Skyline

The premise of Skyline held so much promise.  The trailer with people being levitated up into space ships by the hundreds was absolutely riveting.  And those portions of the movie are fairly interesting.  Most of the effects are great.  The ship and creature design is good.  And there are some truly suspenseful and frightening moments when the characters are running and/or hiding and you don’t quite know what’s going to happen.

But then those same characters go and ruin everything by speaking.  Some aspects of the plot are good and some less so, but the dialogue and dialogue delivery waivered from halfway decent to laughably atrocious.  I don’t want to disparage the acting too much, because I’ve seen nearly all of the mains do very well in other movies and TV shows, but here the performances are less than convincing.  There is little character development and the people don’t always interact or react very believably.  Perhaps the special-effects-expert directors haven’t quite learned to direct living actors yet.  And the script could have used a few more drafts, or a good script doctor.

It has some shades of Cloverfield, where similarly you were seeing an alien monster invasion from the point of view of a few non-military, non-expert characters, some of whom were a little insipid to begin with.  There it worked.  By the end of Cloverfield, or even much earlier, you were totally with them.  But here, not so much. Early in the film when the protagonists were trying to figure out what was going on and they were staying largely in one or two places, I was thinking, “Good choice!  Stay in very few locations to keep the budget low and the suspense high.”  But after a while, I tired of being stuck with these people and wanted to see what was going on with someone else.  Hey, let’s follow that husband/wife team.  Or what about those military guys over on that roof?  Let’s switch to them!  But alas, no.  Everyone else in the movie is just cannon fodder, and you are stuck with the young and the listless to the bitter end.

And speaking of the end, although I am a fan of the left-up-in-the-air ending, this particular one left me thinking, “What the hell?”  It is not that you don’t know what happened.  It’s all fairly obvious (well, except that you never really know why anything is happening, or what’s with the glowy brain stuff).  My response was more, “Are they really going to leave it like this?”  I don’t want to ruin the ending, and in some ways I found the way it all went down gutsy, but at least a portion of the ending is told in still shots.  And it’s a bit of a cliffhanger.  Interesting choice.  But perhaps not the right one for this type of film.  It made it all seem like setup for some anime adventure TV series.  One where you know the series is going to be better than the pilot.

I will give them props for pulling this off at what is considered a low budget for a special effects movie ($20 million).  The visuals are impressive and often inventive.  It has some exciting moments, and is sometimes so bad it is fun to watch.  And again, Skyline has an interesting premise.  I was entertained enough not to feel totally cheated and didn’t leave ranting that I wanted my $9 back.  But I did leave with the hollow feeling you get when you know something could have been ten times better.  The emptiness of missed opportunity.  Time to rewatch Cloverfield.

[Rating:3/10]

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