Synopsis

After a late night party, a group of friends are awoken in the dead of the night by an eerie light beaming through the window. Like moths to a flame, the light source is drawing people outside before they suddenly vanish into the air. They soon discover an otherwordly force is swallowing the entire human population off the face of the earth. Now our band of survivors must fight for their lives as the world unravels around them.

Official synopsis: In the sci-fi thriller Skyline, strange lights descend on the city of Los Angeles, drawing people outside like moths to a flame where an extraterrestrial force threatens to swallow the entire human population off the face of the Earth. Don't Look Up.

Official Review

I must admit that the teaser for Skyline, the new sci-fi action film helmed by AvP: R directors Greg and Colin Strause, actually caught me off-guard when I first saw it, in that it actually looked like something that might be worth plunking down my hard-earned money for. That final nightmarish shot of hundreds of Angelenos being sucked up en masse into a giant alien spacecraft (we can dream, can’t we?), their screams echoing eerily over the soundtrack, left me wondering if the Strauses had, against all odds, managed to craft something truly unique in Hollywood: an alien invasion film (one made for a reported $10 million, no less) with something new and interesting to show us. The answer? Mmm, nah, not really.



Sure, the Brothers succeed in pulling off some truly impressive visuals (outside of one, shall we say, ill-advised slo-mo shot), made even more so by the relative shoestring with which it was all put together. But the story itself, which revolves around a rather standard-issue cast of attractive young adults in the city (hello, Cloverfield), ends up being anything but extraordinary. Our two main characters are Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson), who have come to attend the birthday party of Jarrod’s best friend Terry (Donald Faison) at his penthouse in a luxurious L.A. high rise. Terry, a successful visual effects artist (sound familiar?), is a shallow alpha male type living the good life with his beach-bimbo girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel), a…uh, shallow alpha-female type whose main purpose in life appears to be acting like the most obvious imaginable cliché of every spoiled, bitchy princess type from the last 30 years in cinema. In other words: how long, exactly, are we going to have to put up with these assholes before they’re sucked up into that giant spaceship?


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