Night Skies (Close Encounters II)

Kill it with fire.

Genre: Sci-Fi Horror

Premise: "Straw dogs with aliens". After a series of cattle mutiliations, a group of aliens take over a bunch of country bumpkin's estate and threaten to kill them.

About: The scripts interesting for a bunch of reasons: the puppets and visual effects were pretty far in development, gives an example of the early script drafts Speilberg was circulating at the time, and most importantly provides an interesting idea of Speilberg right before the great disaster that was 1941. Also, Night Skies serves as a sort of prototype of Speilberg's paranormal films from the 1980's (Gremlins, ET, and Poltergeist)

Writer: Legend has it that Columbia Pictures wanted to produce a sequel after the original's success, and Speilberg wanting to jump aboard the gravy train hired virtuoso John Sayles (who had just released the Corman-produced, Dante-directed "Piranha").


Does anybody remember Jaws 2? I do. When I was 12, I made my mom rent this film thinking it'd be every bit as good as the original. The shark was shown right in the beginning. And we realized all then, it was rubber and the story revolved around one singular attack with underdevelop stock characters from a 1970's B-movie (the wheezy nerd, the pumped up jock, and the dumb blonde). This is what Night Skies is to Close Encounters.

And that's a shame because John Sayles is one talented writer.

Sayles allegedly based the script on "Drums Along the Mohawk", one of the classic westerns about a group of settlers attacked by aliens. But doesn't that sound like just a pretentious thing to say? The script starts with cattle mutilations. Allgedly eleven pissed off aliens have landed on an isolated backwoords farm. The family has all sorts of subplots but my favorite is between Buddy, an autistic teenager, and his caretaker sister.

Somewhere in the middle of the second act, the aliens take over the farm and start running a whole new world of chaos. The alien bad guy is named Scar (after the antagonist in the Searchers, and also later the bad guy in Gremlins if I remember right?)

With the help of the good alien, Buddy, who has befriended the autistic kid, the family manages to defend the home from the aliens and win back their home. (There's also a retread of the music theme used to communicate in Close Encounters). I'd just like to stop for a minute, and say could you imagine E.T. with an autistic kid? That'd be like Faulkner meets Ed Wood.

And that's it. It's a pretty traditional monster story arch. Monsters arrive and do bad stuff, nobody has any idea the monsters are causing all the problems, monsters get even worse and do even more bad things, and ultimately it's left to a small group to fight off a horrendous problem.

On Night Skies, though, Sayles seems to be writing out of his range. He doesn't utilize, or attempt to make much meaning out of the script's supernatural genre and ends up writing his usual blue collar western family. When the encounter comes in at the end, I wish he would have remained focused on the family.

Night Skies never got made. Word is the producers thought it was too expensive. This town has a way for masking one excuse for another. This script while not terrible, is definitely not screaming to be taken off the page and translated into a movie, which would explain the endless number of rewrites the material went through....until it morphed, somehow, into ET.


Scooby Doo (Complete Crap)

Atilla (Poor, Few Redeeming Qualities)

X - Wedding Crashers (Mediocre)

Hot Rod (Good)

Definitely Maybe (Pretty Darn Good)

Isla Prospects: None. Whatsoever. The female roles are either too young or too old.

What I Learned: Sayles is great at populating a fictional world with characters. What he does in Night Skies that's really awesome is he defines how every character feels in relation to every character (sometimes just in glances, other times in passing words). It isn't enough to have characters dislike or like each other, if you can built up this intricate web of emotions Sayles crafts and then build a high concept story around it you've hit Hollywood gold. Now if only you could also keep these arch running through the story and provide more character development...