Skyline

--Crew--
Director...Greg and Colin Strause

--Cast--
Eric Balfour as Jarrod
Scottie Thompson as Elaine
Donald Faison as Terry
Brittany Daniel as Candice

--Review--

Someday people will come across the DVD of “Skyline,” chuckle to themselves and think about renting the film they intelligently avoided in theaters. “Skyline” doesn’t do much of anything to warrant a theatrical release, it’s dull, substandard and features laughable dialogue. In the “alien invasion” film genre so highly populated by quality films like “Independence Day,” “Cloverfield” and “District 9” there simply isn’t a reason for “Skyline” to exist.

A group of four friends living in Los Angeles awake to discover beams of light pulling humans toward it. As they plot to escape they discover that aliens have invaded planet earth and the beams of light act as a tractor pull toward alien space crafts. The plot sounds interesting but the execution is where the film falters. Nearly the entire length of the film is spent having the characters discuss about the next course of action and then failing to accomplish anything.

The special effects for the aliens are well executed, as they should be; directors Greg and Colin Strause own a special effects production company.

Everything else is done horribly wrong.

Most of the film’s budget was spent on the special effects and every computer-generated creature appears highly detailed and looks near photo-realistic. There’s terrific design in the creatures, or rather alien vehicles, since we never get to see what the aliens really look like. But for all the victories of the CGI, everything else is just below the standards of general filmmaking.

With only four actors to attend to, this is a film highly dependent on the abilities of the actor and script. Both continually amaze audiences with an inability to understand the fundamentals of good writing and delivery. Some of the dialogue is downright laughable, as one character argues back and forth with another one, it simply seems like everyone lacks some true motivation. One character is angry and then attacks another character. Yet, it’s difficult to care who comes out on top of the fighting because we never got an opportunity to really know the characters.

Surprisingly, Donald Faison who played Scrubs’ Christopher Turk has a supporting role as a character with an undetermined occupation. We are led to believe he is some type of musician, perhaps, a rapper or even a successful music producer. But no one knows, because the script doesn’t make it clear what he does for work. All we can go on is that he has an assistant and a blonde trophy wife living in an apartment complex in LA. What’s his personality like? What’s his motivation for existence? Where did he get all of his money?

From one scene to the next, audiences are fed the dull appearance of an apartment complex. Over half of the film takes place in a 20 by 20 foot room in which characters uninterestingly converse about their next course of action. That’s it. Other major set pieces take place on the rooftop and some action occurs in a car garage. For a film set in a vast city like LA, it’s difficult to swallow the filmmakers approach to only shoot inside a room and not the larger city.

“Skyline” looks like it’s been shot using a bad digital camera. The image is often full of visual noise, muted colors and is poorly lit. Bad filmmakers.

Because of the limited number of locations in which “things can happen” the movie revels in having nothing happen. What we are observing is simply ordinary people doing absolutely nothing against the alien invasion on a large scale.

Maybe it’s because of the script that nothing happens, maybe it’s the budget. But the JJ Abrams’ produced “Cloverfield” adeptly shows how to shoot a film in a large city with a monster menace and features ordinary characters with motivation while creating a story worth getting into. “Cloverfield” feels like characters surviving a large-scale catastrophe while “Skyline” feels like a claustrophobic event happening to only four people.

The best parts of “Skyline” are when none of the actors are present on screen. When several fighter jets strike against the alien menace we start to get an interesting sense of action, but that, too, is limited. We never learn how the attacks against the alien invasions are being coordinated. We’re simply witnessing it, just as if we were to look up and watch an air show. We learn nothing about what’s going on or get an explanation of it. The action just happens with no consequence or reason.

For a film to be moving emotionally and thematically, there has to be something more than just visual effects, there has to be purpose, progression and above all, a point. “Skyline” has nothing going for it despite pretty pixels, because that, too, is sub par compared to “Transformers” and the other impending LA alien invasion film “Battle: Los Angeles.” “Skyline” looks like a straight to DVD release with a plot lifted from an unimaginative TV show. It isn’t quality filmmaking, it’s trash.