Remember how there were two asteroid movies that came out close to each other (Armageddon and Deep Impact) and two volcano movies that did the same (Dante’s Peak and the creatively-titled Volcano)? This past year has seen the same thing happen with alien invasion movies set in L.A., namely Skyline and Battle: Los Angeles.
I watched Skyline and it was mediocre at best. The effects were decent and the alien design was competent if uninspired (the usual weird organic/machine hybrids, much like those seen in The Matrix sequels) but the movie overall was limp. The opening has some promise — a series of mysterious blue lights drop down from the sky — but once the alien reveal is made and the assault begins in earnest the movie lumbers along with its ultimately uninteresting band of survivors trying to escape the luxury beachside tower they are holed up in. Inevitably their numbers get whittled down as they get plucked off/sucked into the light or the hungry maw of an alien one by one. When it was down to the young couple who have both been exposed partly to the magic alien transformation light I realized I didn’t care about their fate. It’s suggested that their partial exposure (and the woman being newly preggers) may have saved them and even though the man goes through the whole transformation and becomes a big glistening alien hulk thing with blinky lights for eyes, he still retains enough of his human self to save the woman from being turned into an alien snack. To what effect I don’t know, since the coda also establishes that the aliens have pretty much trashed every city across the world and a nuke dropped on L.A. only made them even more ticked off.
It was a better ending than uploading a virus into the mothership, so I will give the filmmakers credit for that.
As with so many alien movies, the reason behind the invasion is so much poorly-explained, unbelievable nonsense. It seems that humans are being caught and used to ‘hatch’ new aliens, which begs the question of what the aliens did before they arrived on Earth. It’s not even worth pondering more than that.
Thumbs down, although the lead actor was kind of cute, so on a scale on one to ten aliens, Skyline rates three aliens and one mutant alien/human offspring. For having a cute lead actor in a bad movie, Skyline rates a six.