SKYLINE: The REAR WINDOW of Alien Invasion Flicks?

I remember seeing the trailer for SKYLINE in the theater and thinking how cool it looked.  I love alien invasion movies and this one looked like the granddaddy of them all.  I couldn't wait to see it.  But one week before it opened I found out that the Strause Brothers directed it.  Instantly I became disinterested.  To hell with those guys.  They completely screwed up the ALIENS VS. PREDATOR movie and I wasn't going to give them any of my hard earned monies.  I was going to wait five years until SKYLINE made it's SyFy Channel debut.  But if you know me well enough you know one of my most dominate character traits is that I am a huge hypocrite.  No, I did not spend the ten buck-a-roos to see this in the theater.  I spent 22 monies on the blu-ray the first day it came out.  I was bored, okay?

I was expecting epic fail throughout SKYLINE but instead I found this movie to be pretty good.  It's basically about a bunch of hipsters sitting in their apartment watching the world get taken over by aliens.  If you wanted to be bold you could say that this movie was kind-of-sort-of Hitchcockian.  SKYLINE is the REAR WINDOW of alien invasion flicks.  But I am not saying that.  You are.  The movie never really goes anywhere and they have a really stupid plan to escape the aliens.  They try to get to the ocean because the large alien ship hovering over the city isn't over the ocean so that means the ocean is safe.  What?  I can't tell if the movie is being dumb on purpose or not.  I kind of want to give the directors the benefit of the doubt but then I remember that these guys made AVP-R.  I still couldn't help but like this movie.  I like B-Movies and it seems to me that this is what the makers set out to make.  They made a big budgeted B-Movie.  I like the tentacle aliens, and the giant aliens that suck people up into their claws.  I like that they came to earth to harvest peoples brains.  That is so epic.  I enjoyed these elements.  I like that the movie ended on a positive note too.  The characters are fine.  They didn't bother me even if they tend to be stupid.  Hey, I'm stupid too so I can relate.  If an alien invasion happened right now I would probably be the first to have my delicious brain sucked out.  But this movie has it's problems.  And since I am such a negative ninny I want to talk about those.  Shall we?

First off aliens that don't die when you shoot them are no fun.  Nothing sucks more in an alien movie when the aliens don't obey the rules of being dead.  Just because you are a highly evolved race with lasers and awesome flying thingys doesn't mean you can cheat death.  In SKYLINE aliens get chopped up, shot, blown up and nuked and they just get right back up as if nothing happened.  The same darn thing happens to me on CALL OF DUTY.  I shoot a guy in the back and he just turns around and shoots me in the face.  What am I shooting?  TIC-TACS!?!  Am I just running around with extremely expensive Pez Dispensers?  To hell with that game.  Anyhoo, a good alien movie should have a high alien body count too.  It makes the movie more badass.

The previews made a big freakin deal about the big blue light capturing people.  These massive ships open up and this blue light is beamed down and all these things are floating in it and then the camera zooms in and you can see that the things are people.  Its a cool image in the preview but I don't think they use it in the movie.  If they do it isn't show with the same impact that the trailer left you with.  Its a moment that should be a more memorable than what it is.  In fact if it wasn't for the poster I wouldn't have remembered that moment in the film since it happens at the beginning only.  So much happens from that moment to the end that it can be easily forgotten.

All these alien movies look the same, don't they?  TRANSFORMERS 1,2,3, SKYLINE, COWBOYS & ALIENS, BATTLEFIELD: LOS ANGELES, and soon BATTLESHIP THE BOARD GAME: THE MOVIE all kind of look the same with their elaborate metallic alien ship designs and heavy C.G.I. special effects.  They all look like they were filmed by the same director too.  There are giant ships in the sky,  cities destroyed, quick flying smaller ships, and so on.  I think the same FX guys who made SKYLINE did the effects for BATTLEFIELD too.  Maybe I am getting too old but these movies kind of blur together like hip hop videos.  They all look the same.

I enjoyed SKYLINE.  It does get a little boring in the middle due to the fact that the movie doesn't go anywhere.  The movie struggles to get things moving along sometimes but it's still good.  Look at the all the WAR OF THE WORLD movies.  They are all pretty much plot less too.  That is a story about people standing around getting blasted by aliens because humans lack the technology to defeat them.  That first WAR OF THE WORLDS movie is great.  So I am giving SKYLINE a break.  I am not going to say it's dumb even though it's dumb. 

Jason