Watch the Skies (dir. Victor Danell)

by Jack Martin | Jul 11, 2025

Certificate: 12A

Running Time: 116 mins

UK Distributor: Signature Entertainment

UK Release Date: 11 July 2025

WHO’S IN WATCH THE SKIES?

Inez Dahl Torhaug, Jesper Barkselius, Sara Shirpey, Eva Melander, Håkan Ehn, Isabelle Kyed, Mathias Lithner

WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?

Victor Danell (director, writer, editor), Jimmy Nivrén Olsson (writer), Albin Pettersson and Olle Tholén (producers), Oskar Sollenberg and Gustaf Spetz (composers), Hannes Krantz (cinematographer), Fredrik Morheden (editor)

WHAT’S IT ABOUT?

A rebellious teen (Torhaug) teams with a quirky UFO club for a purposeful adventure…

WHAT ARE MY THOUGHTS ON WATCH THE SKIES?

AI is going a lot of places that it probably shouldn’t nowadays, and in film – a medium that is really best reserved for the artistic human mind – we’re witnessing more and more of its frightening presence, with films like Late Night with the Devil and The Brutalist garnering controversy for their unethical use of the technology. Then, we have Watch the Skies, a Swedish film originally shot in the local language that has since been made to look and sound like everyone is speaking English. How is this so? AI, of course, for the film employs an innovative new program that takes the re-recorded English dialogue and generates CGI mouths on the actors to match what they’re saying, thereby removing the need for those pesky subtitles or traditional dubs where the new dialogue doesn’t synchronise as well.

How exactly this little experiment works out is a topic yet to be discussed in this review. But it is, in fact, the most interesting thing about a film that, ironically, feels like it has been partially generated by AI, given how familiar and derivative it can often seem despite its otherwise good intentions.

Set in 1996, the film follows Denise (Inez Dahl Torhaug), a rebellious teen who often finds herself on the opposite side of the law, thanks to her being caught breaking into buildings using a Game Boy and riding away on her motorbike. But deep down, this seemingly hardened adolescent is hurting, because when she was younger her father, who was a member of a quirky UFO-searching group called UFO Sweden, suddenly disappeared when investigating a possible sighting, and ever since she’s been desperate for answers to his whereabouts. When she discovers his car has suddenly crash-landed in a barn, Denise is convinced that he’s still out there in the unknown, and so she turns to UFO Sweden and its chairman Lennart (Jesper Barkselius) for help in uncovering the truth, whilst also avoiding not just the shady government organisation HMSI, but overly-dedicated supercop Tomi (Sara Shirpey) who is obsessed with taking down the group.

There’s clearly a lot of Spielberg’s influence in Victor Danell’s direction, with some shots and sequences feeling as though they’re lifted directly out of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, carrying the kind of intensity that goes hand-in-hand with a hint of whimsy which balances out into something meaningful. However, you end up thinking much more about the films that inspired it than the one you’re meant to be watching, for Danell and Jimmy Nivrén Olsson’s script cherry-picks so many elements from other movies and shows, whether it’s Contact or Tron: Legacy or Interstellar or Stranger Things, that its own sense of originality is further depleted. It can feel like a chore to watch because you’ve not only seen much of what goes on in this movie before, but it’s paced rather slowly to a point where, despite coming in at just under two hours, it feels at least half an hour longer than it needs to be.

It could work just fine if there were intriguing characters or a plot worthy of general interest, but sadly it’s lacking in those fields as well. This group of UFO-obsessed fanatics are no different than your typical gang of losers in a movie like this, as does the young protagonist who fits the mould of every rebel teen with a heart of gold, and most of them lack a definable personality for them to even resonate as characters (one of them is shown to be carrying a gun to a crash-site, but it is never shown or mentioned ever again, thereby erasing their only contribution to the narrative).

Some of their motivations, especially that of the villains, don’t always make sense, including an elderly member of the group who is for whatever reason so against this mission that he will go to the pettiest of means in order to break their spirits, whether it’s cruelly debunking a close myth or calling the police on them as potential terrorists. Why this group continues to hang out with this guy, let alone still have him be part of the group, is a mystery, as is why the cop who’s always on their case is similarly determined to bring down what she deems to be a cult despite them doing very little that warrants such heavy law enforcement. All of this in a plot that, despite moments of wonder, goes in pretty much all the predicted directions, which you can spot from miles away thanks to some handy foreshadowing that, again, makes the film feel much longer than it actually is.

As for the AI enhancements, for a film with a fairly low budget it’s impressive how they were able to integrate them so well into the movie, to where after a while you barely notice the slight uncanny valley nature of peoples’ mouths, which at first makes it look as though everyone in it underwent the same moustache-removal treatment as Henry Cavill in the theatrical cut of Justice League. However, the overall experiment produces awkward results, because the ADR used to re-record the English dialogue that is then plastered onto their faces is noticeably flat and less natural than the physicality of the actors shown on-screen, which somehow makes it look and sound like they are giving more wooden performances than they probably gave in their own language. With a traditional dub, you can at least see the better acting being given over the slightly less enthusiastic voiceover, but since this is attempting to remove that illusion it actually ends up hurting the performers more, since it’s making them seem less capable than they are.

If anything, Watch the Skies makes you want to watch the unaltered Swedish-language version, because then you can know for sure that there are some decent performances in a film that, AI or lack thereof, is too redundant and narratively flat to truly care about.

SO, TO SUM UP…

Watch the Skies is a derivative sci-fi thriller that contains too many borrowed elements from other movies for it to pass as its own movie, as well as ill-defined characters and a flimsy plot, with the most interesting aspect being its innovative AI-enhanced dubbing techniques, which even then produces awkward results.