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| Ironically, "Don't look up Skyline" is pretty good advice. |
Directed by: The Brothers Strouse
Produced by: The Brothers Strouse, Kristian Andresen, Liam O'Donnell
Written by: Joshua Cordes, Liam O'Donnell
Budget: $10,000,000 (estimated)
Starring: Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Brittany Daniel, Crystal Reed, David Zayas, Donald Faison
Skyline is a perfectly forgettable alien invasion movie with a dumb title, mediocre acting, and poor writing sprinkled with some good ideas and admittedly great design work, which is unfortunately lost in the muddle.
Jarrod (Balfour) and his pregnant girlfriend Elaine (Thompson) visit Jarrod's successful VFX designer friend Terry (Faison) in his Los Angeles high-rise for a night of partying and reconnection. When strange blue lights descend from the sky and people start to vanish, this group of unlikable and forgettable folks argue with each other against the backdrop of a brutal alien invasion.
I distinctly remember seeing the trailer for Skyline in theaters. It consisted primarily of the blue lights descending, alien ships appearing, and shots of tiny figures getting sucked up into the sky. It was eerie, and seemed like a fresh take on alien invasion stories. Unfortunately, like Man of Steel, Skyline is another film better experienced as a trailer.
The movie feels like an attempt to make a Cloverfield-style Alien invasion movie (minus the shaky-cam) where the main characters are directly affected by the action but have to instead work out their problems as the world breaks down around them. It's a story I generally appreciate far more than its counterpart (in this case the equally mediocre Battle: Los Angeles), but in this case it doesn't quite work.
The Good
It's obvious that the Brothers Strouse are visual effects artists. The alien design is actually some of my favorite from any recent invasion movies with some really good, truly alien aliens. Tentacles, gnashing teeth, glowing asymmetrical eyes, and the mish-mash of biological and technological aspects make the creatures feel distinctly alien.
The film does a fair job of making the invasion feel like you're experiencing it with the main characters. You don't have any exposition scenes where someone describes exactly why they're on earth, you don't have anyone say "They're weak to this!" Instead all the information is delivered visually, when you see them pop some heads and suck out people's brains for use as batteries. This also justifies why the aliens traveled (presumably) several light-years: while resources are available on any old space rock, brains and sentient species are also presumably rare. Of course, this brings up the question of what they used to power their stuff before earth, but it's always assumed that Earth is just a single stop on the alien train-harvest.
David Zayas plays the best character in the movie, Oliver, AKA Tubby Concierge. I don't remember anyone actually calling him Oliver, but he's by far the most reasonable, competent guy in the movie. His arguments all make sense in the context of the film, and he delivers the best line in the movie: "Vaya con dios, you son of a bitch."
The final assault on the mothership by the air force is actually one of my favorite scenes from recent alien invasion movies. The desperation as you watch fighter jets escort a stealth bomber into bombing range is palpable, and it hints at what Skyline could have been in the hands of a more competent team. It also feeds into my favorite thing about the movie, which is that humanity gets curbstomped and loses the invasion, and presumably gets wiped out at the end. The story plays with your expectations and the tropes of the genre, which is something I wish more films would do.
The Bad
The acting and writing is passable at best, laughable at worst. The only truly memorable characters are Tubby Concierge, because he's a hero, and Terry, because he's Donald Faison. Everyone else is shades of techie and unlikable, and watching them die one by one didn't have much of an effect on me as an audience. Donald Faison does his best to leave Turk behind, but considering this movie was released just half a year after Scrubs season 9 it's still too soon.
The movie turns fairly campy whenever you see an alien pop a brain from someone's head and snack on it like a jawbreaker. Each time it happened the brain was animated in a way that reminded me of the video game Destroy All Humans! from the early 00's, which was distracting at best and comical at worst. Attempts to be brutally violent were undermined by the goofiness of watching an alien tentacle plug a brain in like a battery.
The movie does not have a consistent tone throughout, and it just gets worse as the movie goes on. The bro-doucheness of the beginning is interrupted by attempts at characterization (pregnancy is easy characterization!) and our main characters treating each other like crap. Then you have the campy brain-eating, the hopeless counter-attacks, and the action ending, and the movie is a mashup of differing tones and temperatures that don't mesh.
In particular the last scene and the still shots during the credits feel like they belong in a different movie. Jarrod, in control of an alien mech-beast, rescues his pregnant girlfriend and retreats into the bowels of the mothership, and it's treated like a triumphant victory despite the fact that humanity as a whole is essentially gone and, let's be honest, there's pretty much zero chance they'll survive for very long.
There is a sequel in production titled Beyond Skyline which entered production in December 2014. The same team is writing, producing, and directing, and it's starring Frank Grillo (Captain America: Winter Soldier), Bojana Novakovic (Devil), and Iko Uwais (The Raid). This feels like a huge mistake, as one of the things I really liked about Skyline was that it was a singular story about how humanity lost an alien invasion. According to Wikipedia there is a human resistance, which feels tonally inconsistent with what was shown in this movie. I can't help but feel like it'll be a repeat of the sequel to Monsters, which took an introspective (and far better) alien movie and turned it into action schlock.
The Rest
During production Sony announced it was contemplating legal action against the directors because their company, Hydraulx Filmz had been hired to do the CGI for their own film Battle: Los Angeles. Ultimately nothing came of it, probably because Skyline had obviously been in production for long enough and there wasn't any rule against having two mediocre alien invasion movies releasing within six months of each other.
The physical production budget for Skyline was only $500,000, mostly because the majority of the filming took place inside the high-rise owned by one of the directors, and it doesn't exactly have any big superstars attached to it. Considering the end budget was $10-20 million, it's no wonder the CGI and design are by far the best aspects of the movie.
Should You Watch it?
...eh.
This is a tough one because I would first call Skyline forgettable than bad. If you can't get enough alien invasion movies and have exhausted your other options this might be worth it for the alien design and CGI alone until...whenever we get another big budget alien invasion release...Independence Day 2? 2016 looks like a grim year for alien movies.
But Skyline is most definitely not a good movie. While it is not inept, the acting, writing, and directing all leave something to be desired, and when you can only recall a single specific line (the obvious trailer one-liner) it's a sign that something is missing.
Ultimately, Skyline is mostly forgettable, and for a movie in a genre known for recycling, that might be one of the worst things you can be.
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