Tuesday, September 20, 2011

Skyline ~ Great Effects, Plot...not so much.


Come to Los Angeles, enjoy the sights, celebrate Terry’s (Donald Faison) birthday. Meet his wife Candace (Brittany Daniel), and assistant Denise (Crystal Reed). It just might be a hell of a good time for Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his pregnant girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson). Shhh… Terry is having an affair with Denise, but they won’t get to enjoy it long, hopefully Candace won’t find out…um… what’s with this super bright light over the city? Ahhhhhhh… well… the movie is something like that.

They aliens have come to LA to harvest humans for their brains. Man did they go to the wrong place. The special effects in this movie are tremendous, even if the plot is not. If you’re like me, whenever you watch a survival movie like this, you imagine what you would do if it were happening to you. Like I imagine for you as well, the actors do things totally different than what would make sense to you. Seriously… if we’re going to “sneak” out of town, the choice of the loud convertible sports car during broad daylight with gigantic alien patrolmen would be lower on the “possibilities” list.

When the overly macho building security man Oliver (David Zayas), saves the day, then becomes an arrogant, bossy, jerk, it’s time to leave him before he turns into the psycho we all know he will be, but no, we need to stay in the building that the aliens have seen us run into, and the women never stop screaming which, by the way, attracts the attention of the brain suckers, so by all means keep doing it. So basically, they stay in the building, waiting to be rescued and arguing amongst them until they are all eventually picked off one by one.

At least in this movie, the human defenses are good enough to put up a fight, not win, but we do some heavy damage and there are some Independence Day type dogfights and for the first time, the nuke actually works…. Kind of. The ending of the movie is a cliff hanger. If they would have spent less time wasting the movie with the hiding in the building, moved the ending to the middle, and continued with that, the movie may have been saved.  Nothing like seeing something very cool at the end of a bad movie and thinking, “Why didn’t you do that earlier?”

It’s worth a rent, and a long laugh afterwards on all the holes in the storyline, and like other movies of this type, it has hours of conversation value as you ask your friends what they would do in the actor’s place. At the end of the movie, you’ll have to ask yourself a question. Are you a blue brain… or a red brain?

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