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'Dark Skies'

Dang them pesky aliens! Always sneakin' up on human bein's and takin' over their bodies. They've got a nerve. At least in the summer's movie blockbuster, "Independence Day," the aliens were honest about their intentions. They buzzed in from outer space, destroyed a few cities and went about the business of conquering Earth.

But in the two-hour premiere of "Dark Skies," a patently ridiculous new sci-fi fantasy from NBC, the aliens pussyfoot in on tippy-toe and set about making all kinds of sinister mischief. Remember Francis Gary Powers, whose U-2 flight went down in the Soviet Union back in 1960? The Russkis didn't get him; those darn aliens did!

At least that's what happens in the film, at 8 tonight on Channel 4. The unhappy fact is that watching these aliens take over isn't even the tiniest little bit of fun. It's one of the unfortunate legacies of "The X-Files," which this show baldly imitates: The mood must be kept as gloomy and dreary and as ferociously pretentious as possible.

Beneath that veneer of sobriety, however, there's plenty of unintentionally hilarious tommyrot. The nominal hero is a baby-faced bureaucrat named John Loengard (Eric Close), who stumbles onto the dastardly plot soon after his arrival in Washington in 1961 as "an assistant on Capitol Hill." Assistant to whom or to what? We don't know. But soon he's up to his Adam's apple in alien chicanery and government subterfuge.

It turns out the secret federal office in charge of investigating the aliens is located behind an unmarked door in, of all places, Union Station. There John is given a guided tour by mysterious Capt. Bach (J.T. Walsh), who was with Powers when he came out of the Soviet Union. Together, Bach and Loengard do a great deal of bantering about The Truth.

Loengard: "I'm getting close to the truth." Bach: "The truth is overrated, John." But he must know the truth. Bach: "Truth has a price. You just have to decide if you're willing to pay it." Okay, how much? Bach: "You said you wanted the truth, and the truth is down there, third door on the right." And still later he adds, "A lot of people have trouble digesting the truth."

"We have the thing that they fear most," says someone else, "the truth!"

All that's missing is Jack Nicholson popping up to shout, "You can't handle the truth!" the way he did in "A Few Good Men."

Speaking of digestion, a scene in which a man's brain is sawed open so an evil alien thingamajig can be extracted is gorier than network TV ought to be. So is a later scene in which an alien victim hacks up a really ookie loogie. Bach, meanwhile, carries around an alien trinket that when let free looks something like a holographic hankie. We don't learn what these are used for. Maybe holographic sneezes.

Slow, silly and cockamamie in an unappetizing way, "Dark Skies" ranks as one of the worst new series of the season. As for the truth -- here's the truth: NBC is actually proud of this show.