The Grays

Reviewed by: - 09.12.07

If the environment going all crazy doesn’t kill us all and wipe out humankind, aliens will. No, it’s not the next X-Files movie, although I wish it were because it would have been, you know, decent, but rather, we have the recently-acquired Wolfgang Peterson flick, The Grays. Sure, alien movies have been done. They want to invade, kill us, destroy civilization, you know, the basics. And, honestly, if it’s done well, I could handle another film with or even about aliens.

Now I picked up the script and I find out it’s based on a novel, so I do a little research before I dug in. The Grays is based on the novel of the same name by Whitley Strieber. I hadn’t heard of the novel, but I have heard of Strieber. (If you haven’t, I suggest looking him up - he’s a colorful fellow.) Basically, Strieber was your average horror/sci-fi writer (he even had a few books made into obscure flicks, 1981’s Wolfen and 1983’s The Hunger) when, in 1985, he was all-of-a-sudden abducted by aliens. He was so affected by this event that he wrote a non-fiction account, Communion, and it even got the big screen treatment with the 1989 Christopher Walken vehicle of the same name.

Since then, Strieber has been obsessed with aliens, having churned out a boatload of books on the topic, including the recent novel The Grays. Although it’s fiction, The Grays does contain fragments of what he believes is really going on in the universe. (I also feel obligated at this point to mention that this guy was also partially responsible for the idea behind the big budget fiasco, The Day After Tomorrow, a film I did not particularly enjoy. Yes, it had some cool sequences, but, come on, Dennis Quaid fighting the weather? But that’s another story.)

Okay, so I’ve never read anything by this guy, but I saw the two films from the early 80s. His latest stuff, especially the film based on Communion, has been a little out there (no pun intended), but the guy’s been abducted so this should be kind of interesting, right?

Now before I launch into this review, I want to say that I’m not against people who believe in alien life. While I’m not exactly a Fox Mulder, I’d like to believe there’s some mystery to the universe and that we don’t know what could be out there. So bear in mind, I’m not against people who believe they’ve seen aliens, I’m just against shitty writing.

So, without further adieu, the set-up.

We fade into a ten-year-old boy’s bedroom. Light floods in and the BOY is abducted by aliens. On the alien craft, three bulbous-headed figures take a long metal took and push it against his chest – the boy screams.

Now we’re in space. Lots of stars. A giant huge mass flies through space. It’s too smooth and perfectly formed to be natural and it feels just a little sinister. It flies and approaches a yellow star with planets circling it. The craft heads towards the 3rd planet from the star – a planet that happens to be green and blue.

And in case you failed geography and/or astronomy, that planet is revealed to be Earth. Stars shoot in the sky above North America. They break up into glowing orbs and fly all over the place.

Now we’re in Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, the UAOC, or Unidentified Airborne Objects Center, where a bunch of guys watch monitors showing these orbs flying everywhere.

MAJOR LANGFORD asks for a count. Twenty-seven. No, make that twenty-nine. He picks up an important-looking phone and tells COLONEL WILKES about the situation. WILKES then makes a phone call to the unseen CHARLES LANCE, telling him that “they broke the treaty.” Lance is pissed and tells Wilkes to find out what’s going on.

Now we are in a dark, shadow-filled chamber. A human hand reaches into the darkness. Suddenly there is the flittering sound of Locust wings and a Not so human hand, tapered black fingers ending in talons, reaching out from the darkness. Before the two make contact, we crumble to blackness…

Wright Patterson Air Base. LAUREN GLASS, an Air Force therapist in her early thirties, counsels a soldier wounded in Iraq. As she escorts him out after the session, she sees GUS sitting in the waiting room. She marvels in how long it’s been she’s seen him. He fidgets and asks how it’s been since she got back from the war zone. She says it was hard and then presses Gus for why he’s really there. He tells her that her father’s dead.

At the funeral, Lauren’s father’s casket is welded shut and has a military order that it is not to be opened, is lowered. Titles reveal that we are in Dayton. Wilkes is there, along with Gus and LEWIS CREW, a tall and reedy man with premature grey and piercing blue eyes.

After the funeral, Lauren walks after Wilkes and asks to talk to him. He ignores her and she shouts after him, demanding to know how a research psychiatrist could get killed in action in Ohio. Wilkes and his crew silently get into their dark SUV and drive off.

In her apartment, Lauren plays an old message her father left her on her answering machine. On it, he says he won’t be able to make it to her birthday party, but she’ll always be his little girl. He ends the message with “Goodbye, Lauren.” the sound of finality in his voice.

As she walks to her car in the parking garage the next morning, Wilkes appears and asks Lauren if she wants to know what happened to her father.

As he drives through Ohio suburbs, Wilkes apologizes for not talking at the funeral, saying it wasn’t safe there. Lauren asks if he worked with her father, lamenting that she knew little to nothing of what he did. Wilkes asks Lauren if she remembers taking a test when she first joined the military. She says she didn’t take the test seriously, but Wilkes informs her it revealed a great deal about her – she’s an EMPATH, able to read minds of those who are powerful enough to project their thoughts , and they need her help.

Wilkes’ sedan stops at a gate in front of an innocent-looking farm. Lauren only notices the camera, but the car is scanned by numerous cameras and sensors. They meet up with Lewis Crew and step onto an elevator, set to descend six-hundred feet. During the ride, Lauren hears a screeching sound that grows stronger. Wilkes and Crew are amazed she can hear it already. They tell her she’s the only person who can hear it.

In the facility, they meet up with Gus and Lauren is taken to meet ADAM, an entity Lauren needs to keep from killing itself. Lauren is told her father worked with Adam every day for twenty years and recently, while trying to get information on some future events, was killed.

Lauren stares into Adam’s chamber – despite the bellowing coming from within, it’s empty. On a monitor, a green blur races around the chamber, smashing into walls. They tell her Adam is very real, a physical entity who can stay invisible by not allowing the human iris to focus on it – and an alien life form. Her father communicated with it through image and thought transfer, and they need her to go in and do the same.

Lauren suits up and goes into the room, sitting, as instructed, in a metal chair. She’s told that she can catch glimpses of Adam out of her periphery. A moment later, she sees him moving about, making the distinct flittering of locust wings. Lauren freaks out but is told to pick a memory of her father. Slowly, Lauren focuses on an old memory from her childhood and, as indicated by the sound of “violin bows being dragged over rare meat” (??), Adam does too, entering her mind and making the memory extremely vivid, essentially causing her to relive it.

Boston. DAN and KATELYN meet with a doctor about their son, CONNOR. They show him a video of when Connor was an infant, piecing together a regular, adult puzzle. The two want their son to have a normal life, but the doctor tells them that Connor, now eleven, is special and should be attending a top research university.

Back in her apartment, Lauren plays her father’s voice mail over and over, focusing on the “Goodbye, Lauren.” She thinks maybe he was trying to tell her something.

At the underground facility, Lauren prepares to go into the chamber again. She notices an open door and goes into a video room where she watches a video of her father in Adam’s chamber. On the video, Wilkes asks what he just saw, and Lauren’s father tells him he was shown the end of the world.

Gus walks in and says Lauren has every right to see the videos. She asks if this was the video from the night he died and Gus tells her that her father came in the middle of the night and disabled all the equipment before entering the chamber, and that he may have taken off his glove and been scratched by Adam.

Lauren asks if it was an accident and Gus says he doesn’t know, but explains that the night her father died, the aliens, known as The Grays, violated their treaty in the most aggressive way by having dozens of ships appear over major population areas, a prelude to something, Adam says.

“Prelude to what?” Lauren asks.

“Invasion.”

At this point I was actually kind of curious to find out what all was going on. Personally, I didn’t think the set-up was bad. Then I read the rest of it. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Basically, Lauren keeps seeing visions of a little boy and another of her father leaving his last encounter with Adam alive. Connor keeps being followed by the locust sound. Connor’s dad, Dan, has dreams of a little boy being abducted and sitting on a metal table next to a little girl. Lauren finds out her dad was trying to tell her something.

The sphere things land, one of them near Connor, but Wilkes has a bunch of aircraft scare the spheres off. The government people realize Connor is important to the aliens. Lauren finds out Adam didn’t kill her father, he was poisoned. Lauren finds out some people want to kill this little boy when they find him. She goes to see Adam in the middle of the night and is forced to escape with him. Someone near her turns out to be a traitor. And everything works out happy in the end. Or does it…?

Actually, it doesn’t, as the final scene pretty heavily suggests.

Now this sounds more exciting than it really is – trust me. When I began to read this, I was reminded of Close Encounters of the Third Kind with maybe a little Independence Day, both decent films in my mind. Granted, Close Encounters was good and Independence Day was entertaining (I was a naïve teenager when I saw it, give me a break), while The Grays turned out to be neither. The sad thing? Independence Day had more character development than this thing. Hell, so did Space Jam.

In case you couldn’t tell, I didn’t care for The Grays. Let’s talk about why.

Before I begin, I want to reiterate that I’ve never read anything by Strieber, including the novel this script is based on, so I have no idea if these issues are with the story in the novel or the adaptation, so my thoughts are based solely on what I read.

We’re set mostly in Ohio and Kentucky. The secret chamber lab facility area is pretty interesting, especially in the chamber with Adam, but the rest is just plain suburban neighborhoods, a few clandestine government meetings, and your run-of-the-mill alien craft probe station. There are a few space shots with cool descriptions that could serve up some nice visuals, but most of the time there’s not much going on. With Wolfgang Peterson at the helm, I can see these locales having the shit CGI’ed out of them, but I’m not too certain if that would make them more exciting.

Cookie cutter characters that all felt the same kept popping up and, save for the dude with the piercing blue eyes, I couldn’t keep them straight. Adam was pretty interesting, but he’s an alien no one can see. The only person I enjoyed seeing was Connor, but he doesn’t show up until almost a third into the script. An eleven-year-old boy genius – cool, not totally unique but that’s kind of fun to see. He sucks at sports, he and parents have a complicated relationship, this has potential to be good. But whenever it has potential to be developed, boom, the aliens show up and that potential is shot to hell.

The dialogue was your basic action film dialogue. The characters all sound the same, except for Connor, who had a little personality injected into him, and, at times, his father. But people aren’t going to see this for the dialogue…

They’re going to see it for the action, which was a pretty big letdown. I figured, if the story sucks, at least the aliens will blow stuff up… but no. There’s some big action sequence at the end with a bad guy who doesn’t really appear until, well, the end, but even then, it’s just sort of random alien technology that shows up for no reason and haphazard chasing with no point.

And that really is how the whole thing felt – jumbled, muddled, and with no real purpose. Beyond the fact that the majority of the characters are flat and the action sequences kind of boring, the plotting has some big problems, lagging in some places, jumping too fast in others, and not resolving a few major, major plot points. A lot of big pieces aren’t really explained until the very end, and even then, those that are don’t really fit together (the aliens are psychic AND can see the future?). And when everything is explained, I felt like I was watching an old episode of “Star Trek” - the tone and the whole concept changes so drastically, it’s like it’s a set up for a whole other film. And then it ends.

The ending is what really pissed me off. Besides ending in a way that seriously made me feel like I was reading a rejected finale to the Disney film Lilo and Stitch, the film combines this cutesy, pointless conclusion with what some might call a cliffhanger that basically leaves one of the MAJOR PLOT POINTS dangling, that is, if stopping the impending invasion is a major plot point. Is it bold writing? A twist? A chance to establish a franchise?

Try a big F-U to the audience and it just plain made me mad. Wolfgang Peterson has made some good movies, but lately, his stuff has sunk (zing!). Where is the man who made Das Boot? In The Line of Fire? Hell, even Air Force One? Seriously, this is a jumbled, nonsensical mess that starts of okay, but bites off more than it can chew and ends up choking in the end.

D-, because I’m feeling generous and who knows, maybe in the right hands this could be fun but then again, so could being probed by an alien.