Skyline wins worst movie of the year award

15 November 2010

John Howell

With a silly, half-dimensional storyline, characters most people will hate almost immediately, and a collection of some of the worst movie cliches ever packed into 92 minutes, Skyline is a mess of a movie. There are some good effects (when you manage to squint through the blue lens flares to see them) but nothing else works.

Jared (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson) visit LA to attend the birthday party of Jared's friend Terry (Donald Faison from Scrubs). Terry has become rich in Hollywood for reasons that remain unclear and we discover he is trying to entice Jared to come and work with him. Terry hosts a large party where they meet a lot of vain, misogynistic and vacuous people (as vain, misogynistic and vacuous as they are). "Shit" Jared declares when Elaine tells him she is pregnant, and then proceeds to tell her how he's "not ready". Terry cheats on his wife, everyone else acts as though they're in a bad rap video clip, and this all goes on far too long. With the emotional depth of ants and dialogue this bad, I was hoping the aliens would arrive and kill everyone immediately, but unfortunately I had to wait a little longer. Later in the night the remaining drunk partygoers fall asleep. Fortunately for everyone concerned (especially the audience) in the morning the aliens arrive to scoop out their brains. Apparently the aliens think human brains are tasty and are keen to eat as many of them as they can get their tentacles on.

People fly out windows and into the sky, bright blue alien light takes you over if you stare at it too long, the military turns up with some heavy artillery, and giant monsters stomp on things constantly. Everyone runs down stairs, runs upstairs, then run downstairs again, and then back up again (or was it down again?) just to keep things moving. That's pretty much it really. Roland Emmerich's similarly themed alien invasion film Independence Day felt like Shakespeare in comparison.

The film was apparently shot on a small budget for an effects movie and they stuck to one location to save money - and it shows. Obviously not a cent was spent on the script. My favourite wacky bit was near the end of the film when Jared has a fist fight with a smaller alien that looks like a giant vagina. Didn't anyone think to edit this bit out? He seemed to go on punching it for about 10 minutes. Was he trying to exorcise some dark psychological trauma from his past? Were we supposed to have picked this up in some other part of he movie? Would we care if we had?

A twist at the end (which I liked slightly better than the rest of it) seemed to have been tagged on by the producers hoping for a sequel. God help us if they do make a follow up!

I was enthusiastic when I saw the trailer, but this one turned out to be mindless in the extreme. The acting wasn't terrible, but they had nothing (literally a vacuum) to work with. Unless you're in it for the effects alone, or think brain eating aliens sounds like a cool idea, I'd give this one a miss.

Related Articles

Battle: Los Angeles reviews damning...
I’ve not had the chance to watch Battle: Los Angeles yet, bu...

Full-scale alien invasion in Skyline: official trailer and p...
Alien invasion is a science fiction theme frequently explore...