Review by Steve Sparshott
Stars Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Donald Faison, Brittany Daniel, David Zayas,
Crystal Reed, Neil Hopkins, Robin Gammell, Tanya Newbould | Written by Joshua Cordes & Liam O’Donnell
UK certification 15 | UK RRP £24.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 92 minutes | Directed by Colin & Greg Strause
The brothers Strause are having a laugh; by presenting their name the fancy way round, they invite comparison with master storytellers the Grimms, and visual magicians the Quays. A bold move when your directing CV looks like this:
Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (2007)
Not a single positive word has ever been spoken or written about AvP:R, other than: “It’s quite short.” The Strauses are undeniably skilled craftsmen, their effects company Hydraulx having contributed to Avatar, 2012 and Benjamin Button, but having the FX guys direct is like asking a print technician to write the novel.
To be fair, Skyline plays to their strengths; it’s a film about an alien invasion, an invasion conducted not in a subtle, stealthy Body Snatchers style, but with Independence Day/War of the Worlds destructive gusto – an effects fest. In Los Angeles (and, we can safely assume, other major cities around the world) pretty blue lights fall from the sky, hypnotising the populace and hoovering them up into the clouds. The next day, fussily-designed spaceships descend, repeat the process and release swarms of interesting creatures to round up the stragglers. The alien designs are the film’s greatest strength; the ships look like vast agglomerations of clockwork components, while the aliens themselves have a strong bio-mechanical Matrix flavour. Flying squid and octopi with built-in hypnotising lights and multi-storey carpark-size things that are part gorilla, part slug and all bastard are out to get our heroes.
Ah yes, people. There are people in Skyline; Jarrod (Balfour), with girlfriend Elaine (Thompson) is visiting his newly successful friend Terry (Faison), and they proceed to party down with Candice, Denise and Ray (Daniel, Reed and Hopkins). The invaders’ first harvest misses them because Terry’s posh flat has quality blinds.
Over the next two days the party crew, later joined by grumpy Oliver (Zayas), argue about whether to make a run for it or stay put, the US Air Force steams in, bigger and tentaclier monsters appear, and the silliness of the whole thing rises steadily. In fact the ridiculousness graph becomes almost vertical as the aliens’ plan is finally revealed … there’s plenty of action, which the brothers direct well, and there’s a script, with words. It’s mostly “Oh my God!” reactions, “Run!”, “Get down!” and so on. It pains me to report that Zayas (so likeable in Dexter) is pretty rotten, delivering awful tough guy “Pull yourself together!” lines with his INTENSITY knob turned up to 11. As for the rest of the cast, there’s some clunky emoting, but their job description is mostly sneak-shout-run-wait-repeat.
It has to be said that the lads Strause have done a Hell of a lot with their back-of-the-sofa ($10m-$20m) budget, and one way they’ve saved their cents is by casting actors who are best known as supporting characters from TV series. This could prove to be a very canny move – while audiences might not be too familiar with names like David Zayas, Donald Faison and Eric Balfour, they’ll recognise Angel Batista from Dexter, Turk from Scrubs, and Gabriel Dimas from Six Feet Under/Milo from 24. Their faces, rather than their names, have pulling power, and the Strausers probably got their entire cast for the price of a Ricky Gervais cameo.
Skyline is science fiction from the Event Horizon school – it’s entirely comprised of ideas ripped off from other stories; the only original touches are in the visuals – the ships are pleasingly baroque and the creatures are simultaneously elegant, threatening and icky. But there honestly isn’t a single thing here we haven’t seen before, in Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Cloverfield, The Matrix and District 9.
Apart from the ending, that is. (No spoilers)
Skyline’s utterly bananas ending deserves to become the stuff of legend, both for what happens and the way it’s presented. If I told you what happens, you’d laugh. If I told you what we’re actually shown, you wouldn’t believe me. It might just be a result of budget constraints, or they ran out of ideas, but it’s certainly different and unexpected, and if that’s how it was intended from the start, it’s pretty ballsy. Not really worth sitting through the preceding 87 minutes for, though.
EXTRAS ★★★ We've got two audio commentaries: one with directors The Strause Brothers, and the second with co-writer/producer O'Donnell and co-writer Cordes. At no point do any of them apologise. There are also deleted and extended scenes, with optional commentary (6:35); alternate scenes, with optional commentary (2:29); pre-visualisation animatics, with optional commentary (9:59); and two trailers.