After listening to episode 16.5 of ‘How Did This Get Made’, a fantastic podcast in which they discuss terrible movies, and hearing that their next movie would be Skyline, I thought I might take a look and write my own deal as it’s on instaflix. Here goes nothing…
As the plane lands and they start getting their luggage, someone pushes their way through the line and off the plane. As our ‘Heroes’ watch him pass, Jarrod sees a single mom holding her infant and struggling to get her luggage from the overhead bin, he pushes past Elaine to help her, and Elaine remarks “That’s why you’re my hero.” Why didn’t Elaine help the woman, she was closer and has her hands free? And if that show of common courtesy makes him your hero you seriously have some low standards lady. “J-Rock” and Elaine are brought to their buddy’s penthouse, I guess it’s his birthday and that’s why they’re in town.
At Terry’s birthday party they meet another of his friends, who I guess does visual effects, when asked how a robot fight is coming, he replies, “Dude it SUCKS! But the director loves it so…” I bring this up because the directors of this movie The Brothers Strauss work primarily in visual effects; they have 63 imdb credits in that as opposed to 7 director credits (which include Alien Vs. Predator: Requiem, yup, they’re those guys). Since they’ve mentioned it, and have such an extensive history in visual effects, I’m going to be taking a closer look at the visual effects in this movie, bringing up anything I notice as a quick aside with a ‘Sucks’ or ‘Loves It’. Good thing I'm starting this now, cause we just passed a swarm of obviously CG helicopters fly by.
Elaine tells Jarrod she’s late; Jarrod says he’s not ready, further endearing his character.
David Zayas finally shows up as the building manager asking them to keep the noise down. I hope this wasn’t his only scene.
We’ve finally caught up to the start of the movie, to some basic use of a fog machine and spotlight as alien lights descend on L.A. The Visual effects guy gets abducted and Jarrod makes a break for it but terry is able to stop him, unfortunately. The effects here all suck by the way.
Jarrod and the other guy go up to the roof to investigate, and Jarrod locks them out on it, I guess he’s a special needs douchebag.
Obvious greenscreen of Jarrod and the other guy on the roof, lights are lame, smoke looks bad.
Spaceships arrive to a resounding ‘Meh’ sucking up people like a vacuum cleaner.
After getting back inside they start reviewing the pictures Jarrod took, and they are obviously laid in after the fact.
So the aliens are snatching up people for some reason and they do it by using lights to possess people when they look at them, but they can only tell if people are there if they have a clear line of sight? Couldn’t they have infrared? Or heat vision? Or something? These aliens suck.
Speaking of sucking, since they didn’t see any aliens over water, our intrepid gang of heroes decides that if they can get from the middle of LA to a boat, they’ll be safe. I guess these guys saw Signs and think that aliens would be stupid enough to show up to a place almost entirely covered in something that’s no good to them. And even then, at what range is water no good to these aliens, could one zip up to space and then go directly down to the boat, since the boat would be between the alien and the water? And wouldn’t all the water vapor in the clouds have caused trouble for our alien buddies? Alright, hitting play again… only 40 minutes into this train wreck…
Our team is in two cars working their way out of the garage, the lead car inches out, when suddenly… FOOT.
Ok, shoddy CG work aside, seeing the car instantly getting smashed as it pulled out of the driveway was pretty funny, although the guy driving should probably have been instantly dead, he bites it pretty quick though, fortunately for us, two down three to go!
The rest of our team makes their way back into the garage to go out the other end, they get cut off and look to be next on the menu, but unfortunately David Zayas saves the day!
Not for long though, the alien sucks the brain out of some guy who was being a dick to his wife before to replace the brain David broke when he hit it with his SUV. I hope they give some kind of explanation for this, although I don’t expect one.
After chilling at the apartment for a while, Jarrod wants to make it to the boat again, but Zayas is able to talk him out of it.
Then we get to the part where I wish I was watching Battle: LA instead (which I haven’t seen yet), the army launches an air strike against on of the motherships and manages to take it down with a nuke. Everyone’s happy that it’s over, but there’s still half an hour to go, so I doubt it’s really over. Jarred gets another winning line to as he sees aliens moving about in the wreckage of the ship “They’re not dead… just really pissed off.” Pure gold!
After some more bumbling around Zayas gets a heroes death blowing up one of the big crawly ones, unfortunately he doesn’t kill it, it shows up on the roof and gets taken out by an exploding plane.
Finally we come down the home stretch to a happy ending. Jarred and Elaine get picked up in a beam of light, and we join them on the ship. Jarred’s brain gets ripped out of his head and his body tossed into the trash.
From here shit gets weird. Since Elaine is preggers they decide not to kill her for some reason, and while everyone else’s brain is bathed in blue light, Jared’s is in red. It gets jammed up some creature’s head hole and he’s back in business. Somehow he is able to find Elaine and let her know that it’s him by rubbing her belly and face, and as some ‘blue’ aliens move in, he takes a defensive position. Cut to credits.
This movie would’ve been infinitely better if it ended with them getting beamed up and the world in ruins, we could’ve thought these douches were on their way to being a midnight snack for some grotesque horror.
The effects in this film were mixed at best; there were a couple scenes that didn’t look too bad, in particular the jets attacking the larger ship. That being said, I watched this on my macbook pro, not even full screen, I don’t know how they held up in the theatre. Many of the effects were pretty terrible though.
The aliens defied logic and were pretty bland, it was as if the sentinels from the matrix knocked up the bugs from starship troopers, and Geiger knocked up the aliens from independence day, and the products of both those unions got together and birthed the creatures in Skyline. It also makes no sense to me why they would be harvesting human brains to control themselves. Why would something evolve to be so reliant on another creature? And would only human brains work? And if they actually had a problem with water, wouldn’t human brains be detrimental to them? Although we don’t really know about the water, that was Jared’s assumption since he didn’t see any over the water, I would think it more likely that they weren’t over the water because they came for people, and there weren’t many people in the water.
None of the characters were very likeable to me; I thought Zayas was the best, although it may be because I like him in other stuff. The performances weren’t terrible, I think they did the best they could with the material, but nothing was really great.
No reason to see this, it’s been done better before, and will be done better again I’m sure.
SCORING:
Plot: 3/10
Effects: 2/10 (as long as the directors are happy!)
Music: 1/10 (didn’t really notice any)
Acting: 4/10
Entertainment Value: 2/10
FINAL SCORE: 12/50
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