Review: Skyline

I fell asleep last night in front of the TV while it played Independence Day, The Matrix, Scanners, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and The Mist, and man I had the CRAZIEST dream. Oh wait, no I didn't. I just went to a midnight screening of Skyline. This is one strange, stupid, screwed-up mess of a movie. As much as I really want to hate this film, Skyline sets a new bar for shows-that-should-be-MST3K-fodder. Some movies are meant to be serious and some are meant to be comedies. Then there are the little nuggets that, while meant to be serious, are just more comical than they were ever supposed to be. Watching this at midnight with a bunch of friends will remain one of my more enjoyable memories.

Skyline isn't just bad. It tricks you into thinking it might actually be good. Opening credits, first shot, you have an eerie and unspeakably insidious alien attack. Reminiscent of Shyamalan's Signs, people are holed up at home and spooky lights appear through the windows. (Actually, everything in Skyline is unfortunately reminiscent of something else) Unlike Signs, though, these lights elicit some surprising physiological effects that culminate in making people disappear. This is one of the most attention-grabbing 3-minute openings to a sci-fi/horror film in recent memory.

And then we just cut to "15 hours earlier" for 20 minutes of character exposition that tells us exactly what we already learned in the first 3 minutes. Watching this informs the audience 1) Our characters are in an expensive high-rise penthouse sleeping off a raging bender; 2) Eric Balfour has gotten his girlfriend Scottie Thompson pregnant; 3) Aliens are attacking.

The first sign of how bad things were going to get was the party scene shot with such poor lighting it looked like some kind of grainy camera-phone footage. Then we get to see the partygoers peeping-tom through a high-powered telescope watching a neighbor receiving oral sex only to have it backfire and shocking! it was another guy! Gross!!!

Finally, we see a brief appearance from Neil Hopkins as the douchey friend who sets up a minor fight between Balfour and Thompson, a fight that goes nowhere. Hopkins, as we already saw in the first three minutes is the first victim of the alien light, so he's a character that really goes nowhere and does nothing, which could be said of virtually every other cast member. As people are one by one snatched up by aliens, it's as if they never existed. They don't leave a lasting impression on you, and you don't miss them.

People are quick to jump on Colin and Greg Strause as being bad filmmakers. I can't fault the brothers entirely, because there are moments that really work well, almost entirely having to do with special effects. Some of the blame has to be placed squarely on the shoulders of first-time writers Joshua Cordes and Liam O'Donnell. It's no surprise when you take an accomplished digital artist with such lofty credits as Avatar, Benjamin Button and Iron Man 2, put him in a room with a guy whose sole credits include writing music videos for 50 Cent and Usher, that you get a film about aliens attacking an upstart rapper and his posse. These guys obviously did no research in writing this nightmare semi-auto-biopic.

But where Skyline shines is in action and special effects. They've taken a million-dollar script and fleshed it out with 10-million-dollar effects that look like what would have a few years ago been a hundred-million-dollar production. Unfortunately, that production was Waterworld, and it was a much better film than Skyline. The only blame I can throw at the Strause boys is for bringing this terrible script to the screen in the first place. Individually, with the exception of the horribly-shot party scene, I can't complain about any element of the film, visually. The score is pretty good, the casting hardly matters, given that every character is paper-thin and set to die in the blink of an eye. Even the vilified Eric Balfour is exactly perfect for the douchebag-going-nowhere rapper part he plays.

Skyline is the cinematic version of one of those slick iPhone knockoffs you can buy on eBay. It looks good, it costs less, but it is entirely unoriginal in every particular. Nothing is new, and therefore nothing stands out. Thus, nothing about Skyline will be particularly memorable except how, like that knockoff iPhone, it just doesn't work. You're going to want to be drunk for the ending, because watching it sober, I can't start to tell you how hilariously bad it was. Watching it drunk or maybe even stoned might just make you swear off drugs. Wait for this on video, invite a bunch of friends over, get roaring drunk, and watch this while partying like it's 2012 -- er, I mean Skyline.