Full-scale alien invasion in Skyline: official trailer and plot summary

25 August 2010

John Howell

Alien invasion is a science fiction theme frequently explored. From the excessive special effects pulp mash-up that is Independence Day, to the subtlety and tension of gradual alien conquest in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (the better Donald Sutherland version), so many fictional aliens have invaded Earth that I couldn't include even a fraction of them in this article without boring you all to death (so I've decided not to). Now director and writer brothers Colin and Greg Strause (Aliens VS. Predator: Requiem) are joining in with Skyline, a science fiction invasion story where the human race is getting sucked off the face of the Earth by giant alien star ships (think of them as heavy duty Dyson vacuum cleaners).

According to the official synopsis, a group of friends wake up in the dead of night, startled by an eerie light beaming through their windows. Like moths to a flame, the light source is drawing people outside to be sucked up into the air. They soon discover an otherworldly force is swallowing the entire human population and they must fight for their lives as the world unravels around them.

Sounds like a novel approach that could be great fun if handled well. Intergalactic vacuum cleaners used by a Galactic Federation have come to cleanse the planet of humans and their environmentally destructive ways perhaps?

Skyline stars Eric Balfour, Donald Faison, Brittany Danie and David Zaya and will be released worldwide 12 November.

While the start of the trailer shown below isn't particularly original or impressive (especially the Stephen Hawking reference with the clichéd news reader dialogue), some of the special effects sequences at the end with glowing pockets of light across cityscapes and bodies being sucked into giant star ships like ants look amazing. It's hard at this stage to get a sense of how well the story will hang together (or if it really has much of a story at all), but the visuals alone have certainly sparked my curiosity. The tagline is quite nice too: "Don't look up!".

Watch the official Skyline trailer below on YouTube. There's a higher resolution version of the Skyline trailer on Apple's website.

Our Skyline review.

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