Skyline

Rating: *1/2

Obviously, alien invasion movies are works of fantasy, so by their nature they are somewhat unbelievable and require a suspension of disbelief. SKYLINE, however, requires a frontal lobotomy. There isn’t a single character in this film that I was invested in, the visual effects were less than stunning, the story was strained and the entire concept seemed tired and clichéd. By the time the film is over, I had no idea what the point was, who the story serviced or what I was supposed to get out of it. And sadly, I don’t think I can blame it all on actor Eric Balfour either.

Balfour plays Jarrod, who arrives in L.A. with his long-time girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) for a few days of chilling out with his buddy Terry (Donald Faison) in his overly technical and extravagant downtown L.A. pad. In the wee, small hours the next day, a blue light falls at several points in the city and if you stare into it too long, you become so mesmerized that you barely notice it when you’re sucked up into a giant spaceship. After the initial vacuum effect, the aliens start going house to house to find human stragglers, like Jarrod, Elaine, Terry and a few other hung-over party survivors.

Aside from the aliens, the human drama centres on Jarrod and Elaine trying to cope with the fact of Elaine’s just revealed pregnancy and all the “life-changing” dilemmas that go along with that. Not helping is Terry trying to get Jarrod to drop everything back wherever he’s from and moving to L.A… Land of milk and honey. Land of the endless party. And land where you’re assistant will gladly follow you into the shower for several minutes of heavy breathing under the nose of your live-in girlfriend.

Here that everyone? Terry’s a jerk! And if you need any more proof, the first thing he does when aliens are revealed to be on the loose is grab a gun. Meanwhile, Jarrod’s does the typical square white guy freak out at the sight of a gun. (Doesn’t he live in the United States?) Elaine becomes the typical girlfriend in peril, meaning that nothing Jarrod suggests is even remotely convincing to her. Granted, in this instance, Jarrod’s plan to make a run for it to the marina and take off into the ocean because there are no alien ships over the ocean, was idiotic. Clearly, Jarrod thought this was SIGNS and that the aliens were afraid of water, not that he was in SKYLINE and that the aliens were focused on cities because they were vacuuming up people, and there are no people on the ocean!!!

Speaking of residual presence of alien invasion movies past, it’s hard not to get a derivative stink off of SKYLINE. You like people hunkered down in a single, enclosed setting (SIGNS)? You like giant alien ships hovering about a major American city (INDEPENDENCE DAY)? You like looks inside the goop filled recesses of alien technology where machinery is biology (ALIENS, WAR OF THE WORLDS, THE THING)? Then you’re going to love SKYLINE. Except you probably won’t. The characters are lame, and the glimpses inside the aliens’ world looks like something out of a video game, and that video game is Bioshock.

I’m going to do some spoilers a bit here because to get a full taste of the insaneness and idiocracy of the film, you need to know how it turns. Ready? Still here? Okay…

So we learn near the end that the aliens are collecting humans in order to take their brains by yanking them right out of the skull, cast away the other 95 per cent of the human body and putting those brains inside the alien machines to make them run. Come to think of it, you never actually see the aliens themselves, just the organic suits and other war machines that run on human brains. Which begs the question: how did these machines run before they ran on human brains? It’s like Underworld all over again; how did the werewolves kill the vampires before they discovered sunlight bullets? If you can answer any of this, you’re smarter than me. And the screenwriters.

Anyway, we learn all this when Jarrod and Elaine are sucked up into one of the ships. Jarrod gets the brain removal treatment while Elaine is taken away to some icky alien maternity ward where the newborn is ripped out of the new mother’s womb (presumably when the baby’s mature enough to be delivered). This begs another question: what are the aliens going to use the babies for? Why separate the mothers from everyone else? Simple logic like this needs resolution. But before you get too deep into it, the alien stormtrooper who received the brain of Jarrod starts blasting away at the other aliens seemingly in order to save Elaine. So Jarrod was the only human whose love for his loved one was so strong it overcame the alien tech to do his brain’s bidding? Unlikely, but there’s no time to explore this because it’s where the movie ends.

But this is what happens when you get visual effects guys to write a script; the human characters are bland and the alien technology and creatures is meticulous in its detail. And the only really original part of the script is never explored because it happens in the end, where the real movie should have began. SKYLINE had promise, much like the last movie by Colin and Greg Strause, ALIEN VS PREDATOR: REQUIEM, but the whole enterprise sinks under an undeveloped script. When you’re rooting for the aliens to win, you know you’re in trouble. Actually, nobody wins in this.