Skyline (2010)

Have you seen the trailer for the sci-fi movie called Skyline? The one with the blue fireballs plummeting straight down from the heavens all across the urban nightscape of Los Angeles? Remember seeing the tornado-like clouds of humans being sucked upward into hovering motherships? And that scene where the car is suddenly stomped by the giant foot of a scary space creature? Congratulations, you’ve already seen the only three interesting moments in this dumb, DUMB movie–and saved the cost of a ticket in the process.

That trailer had my hopes up. And the movie begins right off the bat with the hypnotic appearance of those blue fireballs, so initially it seemed to be wasting no time with needless exposition. But after about five minutes of building up to the first mini-climax, three dreaded words appeared on screen: “15 Hours Earlier.” Guess we can’t avoid the exposition after all, particularly in a movie so weakly scripted it was likely written with crayons on Big Chief tablets.

So what do we learn from this expository sequence? We follow Eric Balfour, who played ineffective douchebags on Six Feet Under and 24, as he keeps his casting niche going, this time as some guy named Jarrod (no, not the Subway guy). He flies first-class with his whiny girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) to L.A. to hook up with his pal Terry (Donald Faison). Terry, by the way, has a penthouse condo in Marina Del Rey, with lots of bimbos and cool young idiots to party with.

There’s an evening of dancing and drinking, including a brewing catfight between the two bimbos Terry is hosting, as well as an act of electronic voyeurism that the filmmakers intended to be comic relief but is uncomfortably similar to the events which triggered the recent suicide of a Rutgers student (I’m actually appalled that they left this in the movie). I guess they thought it was justified since the character who sets up the camera and laughs at the results is the first one to get fried by the blue alien lights when they show up at 4 a.m. He’s played by Neil Hopkins, who was also Charlie’s heroin-addict brother on Lost. There’s another actor not reaching too far from the realm of douchebaggery.

So the alien ships appear and start sucking up people literally, just like the movie sucks figuratively. Looking at the blue lights makes a victim’s eyes go milky white, and creepy-looking veins appear on their skin. Of course, Our Hero Jarrod survives a big dose of this but suffers aftereffects. Fortunately, Terry’s penthouse has electric shutters on the windows, so the few survivors hide out in this bunker, including the two jealousy-ridden rival chicks who are bound to be alien snack food sooner or later. Terry, an African-American and therefore the primary token ethnicity, leads the defense of his condo, just like the lone black guy in Night of the Living Dead. When Terry gets eaten by an alien (no surprise, you know he’s doomed from the beginning), another token ethnic representative–a Hispanic condo employee–steps in and assumes command.

All the while, there’s this daylight alien invasion that’s such a retread of War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Cloverfield, and other sci-fi effects extravaganzas that it’s almost too easy to sit back and groan at the crappy B-movie shortcuts. Nearly the entire film takes place in and around one set of buildings, which happens to be the condo property where one of the directors lives. How convenient. Furthermore, for all the alien zaps and tentacled crawly things and gunfire and helicopter crashes, they keep cutting to aerial photography of the buildings and surrounding urban areas, and these aerial shots look like typical overhead traffic-copter views, sometimes overlaid with smoke or occasionally with a superimposed alien ship or creature–they didn’t bother to CGI any damage to the ground. It looks cheap.

It’s written cheaply, too. In addition to the aforementioned excruciatingly simple-minded expositional sequence, the few attempts at deliberate humor fall flat, such as when one of the besieged interchangeable bimbos laments, “I hate L.A.” Conversely, other moments that are theoretically serious are unintentionally funny thanks to some of the most ridiculous and clichéd dialogue imaginable. Consider the following as a prime example: Jarrod is about to leave his girlfriend behind momentarily to check out the roof with Terry. Elaine implores him to stay by dropping the news that “I’m late.” (Of course she is, there’s always a pregnant girl in these scenarios.) Jarrod asks her why she hadn’t already told him, and Elaine delivers this line with a straight face: “I didn’t want to ruin your trip.” Nice thought, mother-to-be. Later, Jarrod and the Hispanic guy exchange some less-than-scintillating dialogue which essentially consists of: “It doesn’t seem real, it’s like a dream.” “Oh, it’s real, and you better wake up.”

No, it’s not real. It’s a really bad movie, and I don’t wanna wake up. Let me sleep through the rest of this crap. By the time Skyline (which is a dumb title, too) reaches its groan-inducing ending, the only residual effect of alien abduction is the feeling that mindless Hollywood invaders have sucked money from my wallet and two hours are missing from my life.