Starring: Eric Balfour, Donald Faison, Scottie Thompson, Brittany Daniel
Directed By: The Brothers Strause
Written By: Joshua Cordes and Liam O’Donnell
Produced By: Kristian James Andresen, Liam O’Donnell, The Brothers Strause
Distributor: Universal
Rating: PG-13
Running Time: Approximately 92 minutes
Website: iamrogue.com/skyline
Budget: $10,000,000
Genre: Science Fiction
Release Date: November 12, 2010
“I hate L.A.!” moans would-be East Coast transplant Elaine (Scottie Thompson) about halfway through Skyline as aliens besiege the city. After sitting through the movie, audiences might be inclined to agree with her.
The premise is straightforward and a fairly clever conceit. It’s your usual alien invasion story as seen through the eyes of the civilians on the street who live through it. Imagine Independence Day if, instead of following the president and the military, it put the viewer with the ordinary people caught in the onslaught. On the ground, the civilians have no way of knowing what’s going on when the saucers descend from the clouds and start literally sucking city residents up into the clouds. Into this scenario step Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend, Elaine, out west to visit his childhood friend, Terry (Donald Faison of TV’s “Scrubs”), who now lives in a luxury L.A. penthouse condo thanks to his nebulously defined Hollywood lifestyle. “T-Rock” wants his old pal “J-Dog” to stay out west, working for him and indulging his hard-partying lifestyle, much to Elaine’s consternation. They don’t have much time to ponder these life decisions, however; blue lights descend on the Los Angeles cityscape that night, heralding the beginning of the alien attack.
For the first hour or so of Skyline, the tense and clever set-up carries the film. Trapped and desperate, the dregs of one of Terry’s all-night parties hole up in the penthouse and plot one failed escape attempt after another, dodging tentacle alien probes and their own increasing paranoia. For that first hour, this is enough: the effects, as seen through smoke and debris, are impressive, and the scale of the characters’ pain and confusion are very real.
Once the initial novelty of the movie wears off, things begin to fall apart. The cast, full of faintly familiar faces from television shows, react in increasingly absurd ways as the alien swarm scours the landscape of L.A. looking for survivors and holdouts. A likeable cast of characters has never been a prerequisite for these kinds of ventures – the characters of Cloverfield were similarly vacuous, insipid people – but by the time the survivors come face-to-maw with their attackers, the aliens seem almost reasonable ripping into these shallow, stupid caricatures. As the film progresses, the inanities and inconsistencies begin to pile up, and what starts off as a fairly impressive exercise in low-budget, sleight-of-hand sci-fi becomes a jaw-dropping mess of a movie, cribbing liberally from a long list of superior movies (just a few: Alien, John Carpenter’s The Thing, District 9, and, most egregiously, The Matrix) and doing none of them better. When the ludicrous, overlong finale arrives, it’s already too late: if you were captivated 90 minutes earlier by the eerie blue lights of the alien ships, you’ll find yourself laughing at the movie’s ridiculousness before the end.
There’s plenty of blame to go around. Skyline was self-financed and virtually willed into existence by its sibling directors, the Brothers Strause, who were looking for a more personalized filmmaking experience after helming inauspicious bombs like Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. Skyline shows that the pair (and their screenwriting partners) is good at big ideas and bad at the execution of those ideas, from the leaden line readings wrung from the cast to the botched, laughable plotline. In more talented hands, this could have been a fresh, reinvigorating take on the invasion genre, and for about half the movie, it is. Unlike War of the Worlds, the granddaddy of the genre, germs don’t kill the aliens here, but the Strauses’ lack of storytelling instincts and ham-fisted theatrics strangle the promise of a great concept.
Grade: 2 stars
