I’m still trying to wrap my head around why the Strause brothers included a very superfluous prologue of Balfour’s character being sucked in by the bright lights of the alien ships and then suddenly zooming back to him and his girlfriend in a plane with the card reading “15 Hours Earlier…” Why is that opening scene important to know? What relevance did that have to anything? Did they feel the movie was so mind-numblingly stupid they’d have to lure us in from second one? “Skyline” (a movie Roland Emmerich would groan at) is the “Dragon Wars” of 2010, a movie with a great concept that fails on every conceivable level of entertainment, competence, and creativity imaginable. This is a movie–much like “Dragon Wars”–that should rightfully have been relegated to cable television but somehow warranted a theatrical release all for a PG-13 B grade science fiction movie about aliens consuming Earth and Eric Balfour… well you’ll see.
From Balfour’s bland performance (very evocative of Keanu Reeves on a bad day), every other supporting performance being about as confusingly forgettable and Donald Faison doing an apparent impression of Cuba Gooding Jr. in “Jerry Maguire,” the Strause brothers paired with the lame script really have nothing to do here and can barely salvage a movie with an interesting concept. Balfour plays Jarrod, a man who gets in to LA to meet up with his celebrity best friend Terry and is being tempted to move in to the city to live among the rich and help his career. Jarrod’s girlfriend is of course weary about this. I’m only remembering the characters names because I’m implementing IMDB, that’s how instantly forgettable every individual in this movie is. Just then during the gripping drama, giant blue road flares begin appearing all over the city with nary a screech or holler.
Apparently no one in the entire metropolis noticed gigantic beaming glowing blue lights blasting from the skies, so it’s an incident that remains blender in your brain moronic but after seeing his friend disappear in to the lights, Jarrod is almost taken as well but is pulled back by the power of his friends love who bring him down to Earth and keep him as a plot device while the aliens retreat. Meanwhile our characters spend a majority of the movie in their condo reacting to special effects and literally standing around bickering about the aliens, as characters pull off some of the dumbest moves in movie history. Gasp at character Terry’s insistence at using a semi-automatic gun on aliens that are obviously not affected by it, cringe at the aliens who can’t be affected by bullets but topple when hit by a slow moving car.
Gaze in awe at Jarrod sniping at his girlfriend who storms off and pouts in every scene she’s in, groan at Jarrod’s apparent transformation after barely making it out of the abduction that defies all levels of common sense, and watch as we simply do nothing but see the aliens through windows and from a distance, saving money on special effects no doubt. For a movie that promises to be a dumb giant alien romp, it does very little to motivate its characters outside of their condo and in the land where the aliens are roaring and abducting people with seemingly no opposing force from the US military. The entire area they inhabit is apparently deserted as there’s no carnage, no chaos, no real energy about anything occurring and even manages to make alien ships vacuuming people out of their homes in to a drab affair.
The narrative drags on for an hour before anything remotely active happens as the entire time characters provide vague details about the aliens and argue about affairs, love triangles past indiscretions while we’re sitting wondering when the damn aliens are going to kill each and every one of these vapid superficial human beings we care very little about. The aliens themselves are not interesting nor are they very menacing. Their designs are suspiciously reminiscent of Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” with wide shots of monster rampage clearly ripped from “Cloverfield.” All of which add very little to the movie beyond a backdrop for more melodrama.
“Skyline” is too ridiculous a concept to be taken so seriously as this movie does, and it tries to epic scale science fiction hogwash by offering up some slow motion chase scenes but can barely accomplish that in the midst of the running and screaming. This is a script so utterly hackneyed it tries to manipulate us in to tearing up for two characters we met only ten minutes before! I wish I could have appreciated “Skyline” in a tongue in cheek tone, but the entire film wreaks of amateurism and is likely one of the worst movies of 2010. The Strause Brothers have so far managed to destroy an Aliens vs. Predator sequel and now have made giant city stomping aliens vacuuming people from the streets absolutely dull. That’s quite an accomplishment. “Skyline” is an awful movie, one lacking in energy, pacing, characterization, skill, creativity, originality, and whatever else you want to toss in to this sentence.