Skyline

You know, since I started writing these review people have said a lot of things about me. I’m too critical (that’s my favorite), That I can’t simply enjoy something (…Battlefield Earth or Commando anyone?), That I just like to make fun of and hate on stuff (… your point?), most interestingly of all, I’m a masochist. That last one is mostly in response to the fact that I actually watch a lot of the movie that I really don’t have an interest in, and the fact that I called that attempted excursion into chick flicks masochism month didn’t help. Here’s the thing, if I just posted reviews for things that I watched and really really liked, it’d be 2 things 1: boring and one note. And 2: Self indulgent. Now, this already kind of is self indulgent being a blog of my opinion, but if I just review “Scott Pilgrim” every time, I’d not have any credibility if I have any already. The thing is, while I’m not paid to do this I do like to treat it like another job, and so it just feels more professional to actually do something insane like say pay money to go see “Nightmare on Elm Street” (2010). All that said, yeah, sometimes I actually do go see things specifically to marvel at incompetent filmmaking or make fun of something. Thus we come to “Skyline”, yet another movie to add to the very long history of alien invasion movies.
Those that don’t follow film criticism all that much, “Skyline” has been almost universally bashed on by pretty much everyone. It’s been called total shit, the worst movie ever, and so on. So I rented it, with a coupon, for free, because I really wanted to rip into something truly terrible after the snooze fest that was “Scream 4”. The result? I don’t understand, why is this supposed to be so terrible? I mean, don’t read too much into that, this is by no means good, but why is it supposed to be so terrible?
It’s your basic alien invader movie. It does all the same things done in movies like “Independence Day”, “War of The Worlds”, “Earth vs. The Flying Saucers” you get the idea. It’s centered around a bunch of people in a high rise apartment, hence the title, trying to survive as aliens invade and start abducting people en masse.
The performances are kind of meh, they aren’t really awful, not really stand out. Most of the characters are one note clichés from the other movies I listed and yeah, they can get annoying, but honestly I have seen WAY worse in other movies. The problem is that you don’t really care what happens to them no matter what, and the fact the that movie doesn’t get this means that when we end up spending too much time on the human characters. In theory this is fine and see the above list again for examples where this works, but really, with characters that are stock like this, it’s just a tad on the boring side.
You might say that makes for a bad movie, a lot of the time when I really dislike a movie I tend to find it just uninteresting and that’s why. But, “Skyline” is a different kind of monster, it’s boring, but it’s punctuated with some pretty ok special effects and really it kept my interest because I wanted to see what thing they wanted to do next. The editing was always tight and the photography was passable. The directors on this flick were the Strause Brothers, better known for being the guys that made the 2nd “Alien VS Predator” movie, and honestly, that one sucked but the action was better and the story at least a million times more interesting than the first one (remember though, one million times zero is still not a good number). These guys may not be the best story tellers, or the best directors for anything really, but they know how to use effects and that’s probably from they’re background as effect technicians and supervisors.
Basically, “Skyline”, like “Scream 4” is just kind of there. It’s not really worth your time, but it’s not going to give you a head ache or anything. It’s a movie with a premise that’s been done much better elsewhere and doesn’t really add anything to a genre that’s already more bloated than Jabba the Hutt. It’s bland, plain and simple. Skip it.

1.5… Aliens, I guess… out of 5