SKYLINE is an ordeal by tedium. The script has but one decent idea, the which it saves for a twist ending that arrives far too late to be of interest to those still watching. The rest is but a variation on stupid humans running from the nasty, brain-hungry aliens. Actually, the aliens consume everything, swallowing the hapless victim whole, but it’s the brain that they are after, preserved whole and with the brainstem intact. And that precis is more interesting than the film in which the action occurs.
It begins with Elaine (Scottie Thompson) being awakened by what she thinks is dawn. It’s not. And the vomiting that follows her waking up has nothing to do with the wild party of the night before. After a unnecessarily circuitous flashback that explains why Elaine and Jared (Eric Balfour) are in Los Angeles in the penthouse of Jared’s pal Terry (Donald Faison), the false dawn is also explained. Aliens are attacking. Giant motherships are hovering over the city. Tiny scooter ships are zipping through the air. And the glowing blue lights they both generate are proving hypnotically irresistible to any human who looks at it just before turning veiny, milky-eyed, and catatonic. That’s when the hypnotized human is swept away by an alien tentacle. Fortunately, when Jared goes veiny, milky-eyed, and catatonic, Terry is there to throw him to the ground and break the spell.
Jared and Terry decide that the very smartest thing to do at this point is go up on the roof and get a closer look at what is attacking them. Terry brings his gun. Jared brings his camera. Once on the roof, they witness crowds of people being levitated to the motherships. They also manage to lock themselves out of the stairwell that brought them to the roof.
The rest is a contest to see who can do the stupidest thing and bring along the most people with whom to do it. There are also petty jealousies still going strong despite the impending apocalypse, what with Terry having a fling with his assistant (Crystal Reed) to the vacuous disgust of his girlfriend (Brittany Daniel). There is also a series of other building occupants popping up just long enough to say hi before becoming alien fodder, fodder that the aliens don’t bother to hypnotize before pouncing upon.
Stupid characters are a great impediment to engrossing filmmaking, so is having the stupid characters also be stock characters. So is a faulty sense of internal logic. The coup de grace arrives with direction that is tentative, unfocused, and mistakes long, uninterrupted takes with building tension. Some of the actors try to inject a sense of urgency lacking elsewhere, of particular note is Balfour who gives his all even when trying to make a fistfight with a latex monster look believable. Kudos for his commitment. Alas, though Thompson is properly weepy and gutsy by turns, Daniel is a cardboard cutout and Faison walks through the role with barely a pause on his way to picking up his paycheck.
The special effects are those found in the better genre of video game, with direct inspiration from the Alien movies for the larger, clawed visitors from outer space. The smaller, tentacled versions that are no match for concrete blocks or speeding SUVs, are more fun, though not groundbreaking by any reckoning.
SKYLINE injects an anti-smoking message into an otherwise derivative and obvious plot-line that comes to such an abrupt halt, one is left to wonder if all involved ran out of money, the will to carry on, or both. With it’s not even half-baked ideas and a cheesy execution , this is an irredeemable mess from beginning to end.
Your Thoughts?