Skyline Review

Skyline is what The Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity could have been if the directors knew how to play with their budgets better. That being said, this in no way means this movie doesn’t have its problems. It has quite a few actually and it’s a shame because it could have turned out a lot better. 

The film follows six individuals as they try to survive a sudden alien attack. I’m not going to mention much about the characters because the movie didn’t care to really flesh them out. One is super rich from working in LA. Why? It’s never explained. Then we have the rich guy’s girlfriend, his assistant, and childhood friend, who has a pregnant girlfriend. The last guy, I have no idea if he was an agent, manager, or a yes man as he wasn’t in the movie long enough for me to care. The character development here is very poor and it really hurts the film.

Skyline is a mixture of The Blair Witch (in small budget terms, minus the shaky camera), The Matrix (one character has some of ‘the one‘ characteristics) and The Mist. It could also be a sequel to Independence Day if the aliens got pissed off and sent the real hit squad after us for whipping their ass the first time.

The writers have given us the scenario of what would happen if we were ever actually invaded. We’d be locked in one place, fighting for our lives, not knowing how, why, or what was going on or what to really do. We also wouldn’t have access to the Pentagon and their plans for saving us. Hell, we wouldn’t know if they ever planned on saving us.

There definitely is some good stuff here and the film did have potential. Directors Colin Strause and Greg Strause could have been toyed with a few areas of the film in order to improve it but these are special effects nerds, they can’t tell a story through film to save their lives. None of the characters I cared about and none of the performances stood out. Eric Balfour, who looks like a oversized Frodo Baggins, had one cool scene in the entire movie where he manages to go ape shit and I mean APE SHIT crazy on an alien, but that was about it.

The effects were great, I’ll give them that. I even liked the designs of the aliens but even that wasn’t enough to save this movie. Perhaps the biggest let down was the second ending. What I thought was the first ending I could have lived with, even though the movie would have just ended (another thing I hate) but I could have lived with it. I was about to get up and leave when the movie entered another phase and recaptured my attention. It rolled on with something that had me looking at my watch wondering how much longer we had in the movie because what I was watching was beyond awesome. This was what I was talking about! Something that COULD have made an awesome movie. Before I knew it though, the credits came up and ruined it.

Skyline is a letdown, pure and simple. It’s interesting to watch, the effects are very impressive given the budget, but it’s another missed opportunity by the reoccurring trend of directors making movies on the cheap.