Skyline
1 star out of 10
Genre: Sci-fi
MPAA Rating: PG
Run time: 92 min.
Writer: Joshua Cordes, Liam O’Donnell
Director: The Brothers Strause
Year: 2010
It’s rare that a movie is so aggressively awful that it justifies audiences converging en masse at the studio office, demanding their money back. "Skyline"proves to be one of those movies.
If you’ve seen the trailer, you already know the entire plot and every single watchable moment. In fact, the trailer is considerably more entertaining and coherent than the actual film. The story amounts to "aliens invade, people run, some of them die" It’s rudimentary, and rudimentary can work sometimes. But it’s not even told well. It’s a poor story told poorly.
The perpetrators refer to themselves as "The Brothers Strause" perhaps a reference to the Grimm siblings but still overly pretentious, especially given their output so far. They emerged from the visual effects industry and started a new directing career with "Alien vs. Predator: Requiem" a movie whose only smart component was the word "requiem" Being visual effects artists, you would expect them to have good command of the eye candy in a movie like "Skyline" but even the best scenes are really just okay. There’s no awe to speak of, and nothing is really completely convincing. The worst shots, on the other hand, are downright painful.
All of which might be forgiveable, of course, if there were characters to care about. But what we’re given are not just the flat, monochromatic stereotypes we’ve gotten used to in movies like this. They are uninteresting, but they seem also deliberately, mind-bogglingly stupid. Every decision they make provokes a giant head scratch. Every one that dies kind of deserves it for acting so dumb.
If there is an interesting part of all this, it’s the ending. It is, to put it one way, atypical. You’re probably not expecting it. But to put it another way, it’s a ludicrous failure of storytelling. Perhaps the Brothers Strause can be commended for making a brave choice, but the execution is so awful that any credit you might want to give them quickly disintegrates.
Avoid. At all costs.
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