4 out of 10
Skyline starts out promising enough but instead of becoming more engrossing as it goes on, it becomes laborious. The film just becomes stupider and stupider with each passing frame. In fact, everything about Skyline gets worse and worse as the film plays on; performances, story, script and even the special effects. All in all, Skyline makes last year’s District 9 look positively Shakespearean in contrast.
The film begins with blue lights falling out of the sky and quickly cuts to a few people passed out in a hotel suite after a night of partying. The room fills up with light and the occupants are startled awake. The next thing you know, one of the men is sucked out the window and pulled toward an enormous blue light. Then the directors, the Brothers Strause pull a J.J. Abrams and back up fifteen hours to establish the characters.
First we meet Jarod (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson) a couple on their way to meet his successful best friend, Terry (Donald Faison) in LA to celebrate his birthday. Once in La La land, the happy couple meets Terry’s stuck up girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel) and his assistant, Denise (Crystal Reed). With the main characters established, the Strause brothers try to get us interested in the characters with a few pedestrian subplots (surprise pregnancy, a discovered affair, etc.) that are never really resolved and are extremely pointless and uninteresting. Before you can say Independence Day, the action picks up right where the movie starts and from then on, Skyline is about these characters desperate attempt to stay alive and weather the extra-terrestrial storm.
Much of the movie takes place takes place in the aforementioned hotel suite, with the characters debating endlessly what their next move should be. Should they try to flee the hotel and make it to the safety of Terry’s nearby yacht or should they stay hidden in the room and wait for everything to play out? Soon enough, the alien creatures are skulking around in the hotel and our five heroes choose to flee for the water. They don’t make it very far before a few cast members are gobbled up like goldfish in a shark tank, and once again they head back to the relative safety of their hotel suite. They pick up a new friend along the way, hotel manager Oliver (David Zayas) and once again the characters debate what they should do.
“Should I stay or should I go now? If I go there will be trouble, if I stay it may be double. So c’mon and let me know, should I stay or should I go?”
That my friends, is the basic plot of Skyline. Now on to the rest of the review.
The cast, largely rooted in the world of failed television shows, is largely ineffective and the performances go downhill as the film progresses. Eric Balfour best known for his roles on 24 and Six Feet Under, starts off as a sturdy enough leading man, but once he is forced to convey desperation, his performance quickly falls apart. This is hardly the fault of the actor as the material is sub-par and flimsy at best. Scottie Thompson (NBC’s short lived Trauma) as Balfour’s love interest comes through the movie rather unscathed and easily gives the best performance in the film. She is the lone voice of reason and is teary eyed through most of the film, so at least you feel empathetic for her character.
Donald Faison, so lovable and funny on Scrubs, is woefully miscast as special effects guru Terry and brings no depth to his character. The fact that he is a successful Hollywood effects man has no bearing on the plot and is there solely to serve as a shout out to the Brothers Strause’s FX roots. It could have been interesting if the brothers devised a scene where Terry calls upon his skills to get out of a jam. David Zayas best known for his wonderful work as Detective Angel Batista on the ever amazing Dexter is nothing short of annoying here and when his character finally bites the dust (sorry for the spoiler); I couldn’t help but smile a little bit.
Skyline was filmed for an estimated $10M and as such, the effects are quite good. The Strause Brothers clearly know what they are doing. The alien ships look amazing from afar and the blue lighted aliens they are dropping are visually stunning to behold, but as the bigger aliens appear, the lack of funds becomes more and more obvious. It is when we see the creatures up close and they start opening their mouths (?), which look like female private parts (but in a scary way), and tentacles start flailing around, that things begin to look a little fake. I also didn’t like the actual look of the alien visitors. They are like a cross between the robots seen in The Matrix films, mixed with sea creatures and plant life. To be honest, I didn’t know if they were the actual E.T.’s, or they were some kind of flying drones.
During the second half of the film, we are treated to a spectacular aerial battle between the U.S. Air Force and the alien invaders and it is quite cool. The only problem is that it is too short and much of it is viewed at a distance from the characters perspectives. As much as the flying sequence takes things up a notch, it really hints that there is a bigger, cooler film with better characters lurking in the background, making Skyline all the more lame in comparison.
All in all, Skyline never comes close to living up to its potential and adds up to about 90 minutes of your life you’ll never get back. If you are a diehard sci-fi fan, you might enjoy it slightly more than I did, but chances are, you’ll be disappointed. If you feel you must see this film, it is probably wise to see it on the big screen, if only to behold the wonder of the visual effects during the first half of the movie.