Imagine the scene; you spent a night partying with Turk from Scrubs, and you wake up the morning after in order to find out the Los Angeles has been invaded by aliens. You’re trapped in your apartment building with a small number of survivors, cut off from the outside world, able only to witness what appears to be the downfall of mankind, and become increasingly panicky as the probing aliens get nearer and nearer. On top of that, you also have to contend with the personalities of the people around you, who under pressure start to unravel and do stupid things.
It’s an interesting idea, at least. Unfortunately, Skyline fails to live up to any promise it might have had by being utterly awful. Foremost amongst its problems is that it attempts to tell the story of an epic, otherworldly disaster from the perspectives of a small group of humans, like Cloverfield did. Unfortunately, the characters are flat, devoid of personality, their individual nuances and dramas contrived, unexciting, and so stereotypical my eyes bleed. Here’s a quick rundown; the major couple, whose names I can’t even fucking remember, are stressed because the lady thinks that the bloke wants to move to LA permanently to set up with his buddy. He doesn’t, it’s all a huge misunderstanding, which they somehow don’t manage to get around to sorting out for ages. Okay, so you might think that this is excusable, given that there’s an alien invasion happening, but over the course of the film the characters spend more time sitting around talking to each other about their problems than they do doing anything even tangentially related to aliens. The first half an hour or so rips off Cloverfield even more so than the rest of the film, by spending time ‘getting to know’ these disgusting, uninteresting people before all hell breaks loose.
Like so.
Of course, the end result of this is that it’s hard to give a damn when anyone except Donald Faison gets killed off, and that’s only because he’s pretty much still playing Turk. And he gets trod on before the film even reaches the halfway mark, leaving us with a cast of idiots, and me rooting for the aliens. But even they are tired, insipid and uninspired, since it seems that whoever is responsible for the travesty that Skyline is had no original ideas at all. Let’s take a look:
- The whole arrival and landing of the aliens, as well as a later aerial battle between alien drone ships and human fighter pilots, is frame for frame nicked from Independence Day. I’m not even exaggerating, they are literally the same.
- Then there’s the whole ‘we don’t know what’s happening’ aspect; since the characters are stuck in a penthouse apartment with views all over the city, a plot-powered fog descends, obscuring the nasty sounds coming from below, allowing the characters to only catch brief glimpses of gargantuan shapes moving around down there. Hello again, Cloverfield.
- This theme is furthered carried on in how we find out very little about the aliens and their motivations, other than that they apparently are quite fond of human brains. A recurring element of the film is their ability to somehow get inside the minds of humans with a weird blue light, and how this has a strange effect on the main protagonist, turning him into some sort of superhuman. None of that is ever explained at all.
- When the beasties finally do start to appear, they come in two forms; gigantic super-aliens that stomp around breaking things, straight out of War of the Worlds, and floating, tentacley aliens, which you might know better as the Sentinels from the Matrix films.
The film ends with all of the main characters seemingly dead, and a sad montage of the aliens generally taking over and blowing stuff up. I’m telling you this now to attempt to kill any further curiosity you might have had, to save you two hours. But , incredibly, that isn’t the end; after the fade to black, we wake up with the main character’s lady friend onboard the mothership, with brains being harvested all around. As she’s about to get chewed up, an alien monster bursts in and wrecks everything, saving her: it’s her boyfriend, the superhuman, whose brain now powers an alien whilst he retains knowledge of who he was.
WAIT A MINUTE THIS HAPPENED IN DISTRICT 9! AARRGH FGGFHFTHJMKJ V…
Films According to the Profound 