Watch the Skies review – see the lips move in alien abduction sci-fi with pioneering AI

Here is a derivative but nicely put together sci-fi throwback, in which Inez Dahl Torhaug stars as Denise, a rebellious teenager in foster care whose father went missing in 1988. A dedicated ufologist for whom the truth was very much out there, Denise’s dad was trying to find aliens when he vanished. Alien abduction? Government cover up? Regular old disappeared-guy? When his old car falls from the sky into a local barn eight years later, Denise joins forces with her father’s friends at UFO-Sweden, including the likably nervous Lennart (Jesper Barkselius) plus assorted misfits, to investigate what leads they have, including the potential role of a shady-seeming organisation, the SMHI, AKA The Swedish Meteorological and Hydrological Institute.

You may gather from the names above that this is a Swedish film, and yet the dialogue is entirely in English. What gives? The unexpected twist is that the film is an early example of a technique that you can easily imagine becoming standard practice for streaming platforms hoping to reach multiple territories for minimal cost: AI-assisted dubbing. The original actors have re-recorded their lines and AI tech has been used to edit the visuals so that the lip movements from the original Swedish version match the new English dialogue. The technique is called “vlubbing” (visual + dubbing) and the target audience is seemingly the kind that won’t read subtitles or watch a traditional dub.

The technique isn’t 100% perfect in every single frame, but it’s pretty close – if you didn’t know it had been applied, you probably wouldn’t clock it. But the ethics are murky. Will using the original actors be standard, or are we more likely to see famous voices taking over, as happens in animation? Or would it be too weird to hear Chris Pratt’s voice coming out of Jesper Barkselius’s face? What would it mean if and when documentaries start using it?

In many ways this fairly nondescript film is the perfect vehicle for potentially dystopian tech: it’s under the radar, inauspicious and not likely to find itself widely watched. It’s in fact the film equivalent of the quiet suburban neighbourhood where an alien ship first lands in a flying saucer movie. At the moment vlubbing is under the radar, but this could be the start of an unstoppable invasion.