Skyline

I don't know about you, but when I pay to see a movie about an alien invasion, I want to feel like I'm a part of it. I want to see panic in the streets as the invaders rain their lasers down upon the fleeing Earthlings. I want to see stone-faced military officials debating on how to face the alien menace, and then put all their hope in a last ditch effort. In other words, I want to see aliens actually invade Earth.

In Skyline, we're stuck in an apartment building for most of its running time, while the invasion happens right outside, just out of sight of the camera. Sure, some of the invading creatures venture toward and inside the building, but for the most part, we're spectators on the sidelines to the war happening just outside. The movie decides to focus on a group of people hiding within the building's penthouse, as they try to figure out what's going on, and how they can possibly escape. I could see this being an intriguing and suspenseful low budget hook if used properly. Raise the stakes and the confusion by having the trapped people scrambling for any information they can get, or maybe trying to survive as time passes, and hope dwindles. But the movie blows this opportunity. There's no sense of fear or isolation, just sheer repetition, as the characters try to do the same things over and over, like glance out the windows, or run to the roof of the building.

Another knock against the film is that the characters we are stuck with for the majority of the running time are a rather shallow bunch. It would be one thing if these were interesting people waiting out an invasion happening just outside, but the people we're asked to follow hold no personalities that I could gather. Our heroes are Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson). They're in love, and vacationing in L.A. to visit one of Jarrod's old childhood friends, Terry (Donald Faison), who is now a Hollywood big shot. The other characters include Terry's wife Candice (Brittany Daniel), Terry's mistress Denise (Crystal Reed), and a worker at the apartment building named Oliver (David Zayas). There. That's all you need to know about the characters right there, other than Elaine has been sick a lot lately, and may be pregnant.

Normally in a movie such as this, we can forgive the weak characters and dialogue if the special effects and action are truly a sight to behold. But, this never happens. Part of this has to do with the fact that directors Greg and Colin Strauss (Alien vs. Predator: Requiem) made this film on the cheap outside of the studio system. But then, I remember last year's District 9, another sci-fi film made on a shoestring budget that featured effects that rivaled a lot of the big budget stuff, and had interesting characters we cared about. Skyline is simply toxic junk for the brain. When we do get to see effects, many of them seem recycled from other films, such as Independence Day, Spielberg's War of the Worlds, and even Michael Bay's Transformers films. Even though the film was made independently, we still feel like we're watching a soulless big studio project, since it swipes its images so blatantly.

It also doesn't take long for the screenplay by Joshua Cordes and Liam O'Donnell to start repeating itself. The characters bicker with each other, almost get sucked in by the mother ship's beam of light, try to look for a way out, run to the roof of the building, go back to the apartment and bicker some more...It's almost amazing how little tension or suspense the movie is able to build. You would think something, heck anything, would happen eventually. All we find is tedium as the movie goes through the same motions. The actors aren't talented enough to rise above the thin material, either. They succumb to it, becoming so boring that we don't feel anything for them. It gets to the point that we want the camera to check on other apartments in the building, to see if there's something more interesting going on in any of them.

This basic cycle of repetition continues until the last five minutes. That, oddly enough, is when Skyline finally decides to throw some intriguing visuals and ideas our way. I won't spoil them or go into too much detail, but I will say this - The new ideas presented to us during those five minutes may suffer from a gaping plot hole and require a great deal of dodging logic to make it work, but at least it gives us something to think about, which is more than the rest of the movie provides. The Strauss Brothers say the ending is a set up for a sequel. I say don't make grand plans for a continuation if you can't get the setup right.

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