Skyline

Skyline (2010)

Runtime: 94 minutes

Directed by: The Brothers Strause

Starring: Eric Balfour, Donald Faison, Scottie Thompson, Brittany Daniel, David Zayas

From: Rogue/Relativity Media

My apologies for this being up later than planned; I lost track of time while doing other things. With my schedule, I won't be back until Thursday night. Now, let me talk about an infamous film that has been noted as an exceptionally awful wide release motion picture of recent years, and yet it wasn't until Sunday night that I finally checked it out. After I give the IMDb plot description, what I wrote on Letterboxd about it:

“Jarrod and his pregnant girlfriend Elaine travel to Los Angeles to meet his old friend and successful entrepreneur Terry, and his wife Candice. Terry gives a party in his apartment for Jarrod and offers a job position to him in LA. Terry's assistant and lover Denise (Crystal Reed) and his friend Ray (Neil Hopkins) sleep on the couch in the living room, but in the dawn of the next morning, the group is awakened by mysterious beams of blue light. Ray stares at the light and is taken by the mysterious force. The group of friends try to escape from the alien invaders.”

You know, I had been watching too many good films as of late...

Ever since this came out almost 4 years ago, I had heard a near unanimous toxic buzz concerning the film; I have had it in my mind for a long while to check it out despite (or maybe because) of the terrible word of mouth, but last night was finally the night I watched what I figured would likely be an awful motion picture... although I did try to keep my mind open.

Turns out, most people were right and this is an especially putrid film. It was made by The Brothers Strause, special effects guys who were given the job of directing that AvP: Requiem movie... that was a stupid move on Fox to give guys with no experience such a job, but they weren't the ones who wrote it or decided the movie should literally be so dark it's hard to see (Fox, in their infantile wisdom decided on that, or so I've heard). With this film, they all did it themselves in terms of making it and providing the effects (heck, they even created their own cameras and those were used to film everything) and to me that was cool they were able to make something and have it released by a major studio.

That said, Skyline is rather atrocious. The story and how such a large alien invasion is shown on a very small scale and you mainly see only a few people in a fancy apartment or how the aliens themselves are real goofy and somehow have a light to draw people in to suck them up into their giant ships... it's silly but it's not a deal-breaker to me. However, how the story is plotted (a bunch of stuff happens randomly and the “heroes” come off as many things, including buffoons) and how pretty much all the characters are loathsome disgusting vapid pieces of garbage... yeah, that is a deal-breaker. Crappy action scenes you don't care about don't help either.

As for the special effects, sometimes they are cool and other times, they are pretty bad. It's an issue when the movie is full of CGI. They should have spent more time providing ANY sort of backstory to the characters but they don't, so you have no idea why the really rich dude is really rich, to list one of many examples. So, you just have a bunch of asstagonists (that's a term I use often to describe protagonists who act like A-holes and D-bags; it's unfortunate I have to use it often) who constantly argue and bicker with each other and you hate pretty much all of them and with the story being so bad and the ending being a giant middle finger... of course it's just recently that The Brothers Strause have promised a sequel to this, known as Beyond Skyline. Or rather, I think “threatened” is a better term than “promised”.

Overall, with the 10 million dollars they had they really should have done something different with it. An alien invasion-abduction sort of thing is SO cliché by now. Making something small-scale and not too ambitious or huge in scope would have been nice too. Instead, we got this.