Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
11/13/10
“As for the Brothers
Strauss (Colin and Greg, for the record), I suspect that their next directing
job will involve a giant snake and a former cast member of Stargate:
SG-1”
-from my review
of the Skyline directors' debut, Aliens vs.
Predator: Requiem
OK,
so I was wrong. Like AvP:R, the second feature
directed by special effects masters Colin and Greg Strauss actually stars
a former cast member of 24 (albeit one who's toplined more than
one SyFy Original Movie), and, while shot primarily in Greg's condo, actually
packs some serious production values into a ten million dollar budget.
Skyline, as anyone who saw their first feature would suspect, was
self-financed by The Brothers Strauss in an effort both to shed the shackles
of a meddling studio and, well, to ever work again. But let no man
say the Brothers haven't learned from their rookie mistakes. Skyline,
a man-on-the-street's-eye view of an alien invasion blockbuster, makes
sense, looks great, and delivers 90 minutes of solid B-movie entertainment.
As familiar and derivative as one of those giant snake TV movies until
its utterly gonzo closing moments, this will make a fun diversion for FX
buffs and genre fans, especially alien invasion completists, as long as
they understand the part about the condo and that Skyline 2 is already
in development. But whatever faults you might find with the movie,
it is unquestionably the most expensive-looking ten million dollar movie
I've ever seen and runs circles around the Strauss' debut debacle in every
conceivable way.
Jarrod
(Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) have traveled
cross-country to attend the birthday party of his childhood friend Terry
(Donald Faison), now a show business mover and shaker. The party
doesn't go well: Elaine's upset about a job offer that would move
them across country just as she's learning she's pregnant, and Terry's
cheating on his girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel) with young photographer
Denise (Crystal Reed). A bigger issue emerges overnight, when brilliant
blue lights descend from the sky, mesmerizing the residents of Los Angeles,
who march to gather around them. From behind Terry's heavy automatic
blinds, the lights don't have their full effect on the people in his condo
until guest Ray (Neil Hopkins) raises one of them and vanishes into the
light. Jarrod is transfixed as well, and his body goes through some
sort of temporary change, but the light show stops before he can march
outside. From behind the blinds, the five remaining guests try to
get stock of what's going on: TV stations are either down, showing
footage of empty news studios or broadcasting the EBS tone and nothing
online has been updated since the lights arrived. Jarrod and Terry
head for the roof, where giant alien ships descend and begin vacuuming
up the lights' victims en masse. They escape back to the condo, but
smaller alien craft and huge rampaging creatures are scouring the city
grabbing stragglers. How long can anyone hold out against this invading
menace, and just what do they want the people of Earth for, anyway?
That
last question is pivotal, because aside from 90 minutes of ace special
effects and a lot of people debating strategy in Greg Strauss' condo, its
answer is the biggest thing you'll get out of your time watching Skyline,
another of those currently fashionable movies that exist as the first chapter
of a longer story to be told in franchise form. To fully understand
that answer, you'll need to switch your brain back on: the last 5
minutes demand far more thought and processing than anything that comes
before, although you might (as I did) guess the nature of the alien menace
based on some of the clues writers Joshua Cordes and Liam O'Donnell have
scattered along the way. ******SPOILER ALERT: SOME QUICK
THOUGHTS ON THOSE REVEALS TO FOLLOW****** It's an interesting
alien invasion in the sense that Cordes, O'Donnell and the Strausses have
come up with a very elegant design for conquering planet after planet:
presumably the people of Earth will, once processed into a bunch of alien
machines, travel on to the next planet to use some variation on those lights
to convert their population and so on and so on. Whether any representatives
of the planet where this whole thing started are even present on Earth
at all is an open question Skyline never answers. Perhaps
Skyline 2, should such a thing occur, will elaborate. It will
certainly, by necessity, be an entirely different animal than its predecessor.
******END OF SPOILERS******
Using
their own equipment and home, The Brothers Strauss have managed to deliver
special effects as good as any of the summer blockbusters they've worked
on whenever Skyline ventures outside Teddy's condo. The designs
of those effects are a tad less than original, with the alien ships and
machines owing a great debt to sights seen in Independence Day,
The Matrix and The Mist. But there are far worse ideas
for a low-budget movie than to chronicle the struggle of the CGI extras
Roland Emmerich's stars are racing past on their way to more important
things, and the stakes of a fairly exciting dogfight between the Air Force
and the aliens are very clear even as we never meet anyone flying the planes.
Before the surreal final moments, there's a nifty extended sequence with
our heroes, ground soldiers, the Air Force and their alien counterparts
all fighting it out in different combinations, each struggling for their
own survival. If only that sequence didn't end with such a sense
of “Look, if we don't do something out of character, we'll never find out
what these aliens are up to!” Of course, you don't always expect
the most lucid decision-making out of the characters in low-budget genre
movies, and the Skyline Players don't disappoint.
The
actors do an adequate job within the soap operaed-up confines of their
roles, with Balfour faring best not only because he's an old hand at these
kind of movies (I highly recommend Rise of the Gargoyles to fans
of junk, and he's quite good in it) but because the mysterious effect seeing
the light has on Jarrod makes him by far the story's most interesting character.
Runner-up prizes go to both Thompson and Elaine for similar reasons:
I just wish someone had really sat down and talked about what was going
through their minds while under the light's influence. After all,
they spend a lot of time talking, why not do it about something we care
more about than whether Terry ends up with Candice or Denise? David
Zayas does his professional best as the building superintendent who's somewhere
between more lucid and more crazy than the rest with his single-minded
insistence on throwing a switch and getting down to post-invasion business.
You
almost certainly have to be interested in the alien invasion subgenre to
care to find the virtues in Skyline's highlights and unique point
of view. Guilty as charged. And I'm no hater: I always
root for filmmakers and stars to build upon past failures and deliver what
I'm paying for, and this film marks a quantum leap into adequacy for Colin
and Greg Strauss. Four or five more comparable improvements and they
might actually be in a position to make Independence Day rather
than just riff on it. One step at a time. |
