November 16, 2010

  • Skyline

    ...well, it wasn't SO so bad, but I do get why people are saying it is.  It just wasn't outspoken.  It didn't stand out as its own epic alien movie.  Spoilers imminent.

    There's no meat. No substance.  It tried hard to be something to be taken seriously, but it tried to do that without the addition of anyone interesting to attach yourself to.  It ended up becoming something even a little comical simply because the very dull characters didn't seem to have a clue on how to react to something, so they'd just go for overacting or underacting.  The acting was just meh, and the characters were a drag. You sorta don't even care what happens to them since they're not at all appealing.  None of them were really believable and were more just a nuisance I didn't mind seeing killed off whenever the time would come.  This movie was simply trying to be something it's just not, and that's where it goes wrong, which is what brings on the poor reviews.

    What does it try to be?  It tries to be the Starship Troopers of the Matrix in a War of the Worlds on Independence Day in Cloverfield.  It had bits and pieces from all of those movies combined, so it didn't really feel original in the terms of overall look.  The brain snatching from Starship Troopers, the flying machines in Matrix, the snooping tentacles in War of the Worlds, the mini ships from the massive mother ships having aerial battles from Independence Day, and the gargantuan monster stampeding the city in Cloverfield, all of which can be found in Skyline. The aliens were cool in their way, don't get me wrong. The hypnotic glows they emitted to envelope their would-be victims was very cool.  The tentacled ones were my favorite; they were like Octopus walking on land with multiple glowing eyes like spiders. And the regeneration aspects were pretty neat, as well as unexpected. 

    Still, as cool as the visuals were and even some bits of the score, it very much missed the mark.  It had this great potential to be something beyond a copycat of everyone else.  But the plot was watery and thin.  You never get an answer as to why the aliens wanted human brains, other than helping them regenerate themselves.  But given that the end of the movie depicts a character's brain still having the mind of the human it came from, then what's the point?  The movie is mostly told from the perspective of the handful of boring characters (something else it likely tries to use off of "Cloverfield") and thus we don't know what's going on beyond what they're looking at.  The only other people that existed were the ones being abducted way out far in the distance that you only see over the span of, oh 30 seconds, so you feel a little starved of some serious casualties.  They don't even fully satisfy your curiosity as to why the exposure to the alien's light leaves you stronger.  They made it seem like any person who gazes at the light is "infected" with something, but they don't pursue that idea.  Too much was just left up in the air.

    So eh...I enjoyed it for what it was, but didn't enjoy it for what it could've been.  It's gonna feel odd to say this, but I don't really see it becoming a part of my DVD collection.  It just didn't have that memorability about it.  In other words, definitely forgettable.