Is That Your Boy?: Monster Movie of the Week: Skyline (2010)

SKYLINE
Genre: Sci-fi/Survival
Directed by: The Brothers Strause

THE MOVIE

We are experiencing a mini-boom of alien invader stories: Battle Los Angeles, Cowboys & Aliens and Falling Skies and V on TV. We have yet to get a great one in this wave but Skyline is an interesting take on the genre from The Brothers Strause, who are best known for directing Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. Like the great Signs from M. Night Shyamalan, Skyline aims for a smaller scope than your average over-baked invasion movie. The movie limits the action to a small group of survivors in a residential high-rise in L.A and the immediate area.

Maybe the most remarkable thing about Skyline is the fact that it was produced for around ten million dollars, which is amazingly cheap considering the amount of high-quality effects work in the movie. Skyline went on to make about $80 million world-wide, so this is the kind of story that movie studios like to see and no doubt The Brothers Strause will get lots of work if only for their ability to bring in a good looking movie for very little cost.

The human story is more of an afterthought as they often are in these movies. I wish all of these James Cameron-wannabe filmmakers would go back and watch Terminator and Aliens. One thing Cameron did beautifully in those movies was make the relationships the backbone of his action/sci-fi movies and give us compelling characters that we care about. This is pretty much a lost art today. Skyline features a forgettable plot about a guy, Jared, and his wife visiting his friend who is a hotshot effects artist in L.A. (Donald Faison, who manages to be both douchey and nerdy). The invasion happens after they have a big party and there are several other ancillary characters who are pretty much interchangeable. In fact, most of the female characters were such ciphers that I had trouble telling them apart.

This all adds up to a movie that-while severely lacking in drama and characterization-has the loose feeling of a scrappy small production that is being produced out of love for the genre. There is something fun and pure about two brothers making a sci-fi movie on the cheap out of their condo. While not great or groudbreaking, Skyline delivers lots of action and thrills.

THE MONSTERS/EFFECTS

Skyline is one of those movies in which the line between creature and vehicle is hard to discern. We first witness the aliens in the forms of their great and spindly ships. The technology of the aliens is very complex and spiky and lit by eerie blue lights. It's an aesthetic not unlike the Transformers movies.

We also see a lot of drones floating around and it is not clear whether these are purely mechanical or partly organic. They are a bit reminiscent of the Sentinels from the Matrix movies. More monstrous are the large, ogre-like creatures which prevent our protagonists from escaping the building. Like the other creatures, these guys feature a slimy, bio-mechanical look.

The last scene of the movie is an interesting coda that actually sets up a cooler story than anything before it. Throughout the movie, the aliens had been abducting people and in the final scene we see then ripping out brains and placing them into brutish bio-mechanical bodies, presumably to serve as their army. These guys are big and almost gorilla-like, with huge deadly claws.

MOST MEMORABLE MOMENT/MINORITY REPORT

Sadly, not a good one. Latino actor David Zayas, in addition to having to awkwardly mouth the word-salad that is the script, is not only given a cliche action movie line, but one that suddenly and unnecessarily calls ridiculous attention to his ethnicity, in the way that screenwriters like to call out their Hispanic characters by throwing a lil Spanish 101 into their English dialogue.