SKYLINE: Night Of The Living High-Concept Alien Invaders

Plenty of sub­stan­dard genre fare gets released every year but few efforts from 2010 took the shel­lack­ing that Skyline received.  One would think a $10 mil­lion dol­lar effort made by FX guys would charm the genre crowd but that was not the case here.  It stiffed on its open­ing week­end and had to endure flam­ing arrows from pro­fes­sional crit­ics and fans alike.  This is unfor­tu­nate because despite an unwieldy final act, much of Skyline plays well in a fun, unpre­ten­tious ‘pro­gram­mer’ sort of way — and it’s cer­tainly try­ing harder than the crappy remakes (ahem, ahem) genre fans endured dur­ing 2010.

The plot is a sim­ple but effec­tive b-movie ver­sion of a “high con­cept” premise.  After a quick in media res “aliens attack” pro­logue, the film cuts back to the actual begin­ning of its story: strug­gling artist Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his sig­nif­i­cant other Elaine (Scottie Thompson) fly to L.A. so they can visit his suc­cess­ful show­biz pal Terry (Donald Faison), who is angling to get Jarrod to move out there and join his crew.  Terry also some issues of his own, like try­ing to jug­gle tro­phy wife Candice (Brittany Daniels) with roman­ti­cally inclined assis­tant Denise (Crystal Reed).  Meanwhile, Elaine reveals to Jarrod that she has become pregnant.

However, all these sub­plots are ren­dered moot in the wee hours of the fol­low­ing morn­ing when alien space­ships fly down from the sky and begin snatch­ing hap­less humans up.  Our heroes find them­selves trapped in Terry’s high-rise apart­ment com­plex as they try to fig­ure out how to escape or sur­vive with the help of the building’s land­lord, Oliver (David Zayas).  Unfortunately for them, the space­ships send­ing out their own smaller sen­tries to look for sur­vivors.

In other words, it’s basi­cally Assault On Precinct 13 (or Night Of The Living Dead) but set in a high-rise with aliens as the face­less attack­ers instead of gangstas or zom­bies.  There are also echoes of Independence Day and the Spielberg ver­sion of War Of The Worlds, not to men­tion some visual effects that seem to be ref­er­enc­ing V and District 9.  This highly ref­er­en­tial setup is for­giv­able because the cre­ators clearly love the sci-fi and hor­ror stuff they are ref­er­enc­ing (direc­tors Colin and Greg Strouse come from an FX back­ground, as do writ­ers Joshua Cordes and Liam O’Donnell) and the high-concept take on alien inva­sion is a fun one.  It’s not the most orig­i­nal thing to come down the pike but the first act sets things up in a crisp, effi­cient man­ner and the sec­ond act main­tains a solid flow of set­pieces — the best might be an alien attack in an under­ground garage dur­ing an abortive escape attempt.

Unfortunately, the sec­ond half of Skyline begins to lose its grip on the plot threads, result­ing in a third act that loses con­trol of the story alto­gether.  Without get­ting too heav­ily into spoil­ers, the film­mak­ers decide to go all-out with action and over-the-top visual and makeup FX dur­ing their finale.  It’s a bit jar­ring because the first and sec­ond acts dole out the skir­mishes and effects in a con­trolled style befit­ting the claus­tro­pho­bic nature of the premise.

When the action gets pumped up, the sus­pen­sion of dis­be­lief drops as the action becomes silly and con­trived in a way that favors out­landish spec­ta­cle over sto­ry­telling.  For exam­ple, there’s an eye-rolling amount of near-misses engi­neered for our sur­vivors so the film­mak­ers can trot out their full range of spe­cial effects.  There’s also a bizarre coda that seems to be the begin­ning of an entirely dif­fer­ent film instead of a proper end­ing for this one.

As a result, Skyline ends up being a mis­fire — but it’s a noble mis­fire, one that works pretty hard to keep its audi­ence engaged and has fun with the trap­pings of its cho­sen genre.  The char­ac­ter­i­za­tions are stock stuff but they are decently enacted (Balfour makes a solid lead actor and Zayas lends cred­i­ble sup­port), the aliens are well-designed, the pac­ing is snappy and there are sev­eral wor­thy set­pieces along the way.  Simply put, Skyline might have some sig­nif­i­cant flaws but the genre fan could do much worse — and it’s more enter­tain­ing than its poor recep­tion would lead you to believe.