Film Review with Robert Mann – Skyline

14th November 2010

Skyline ***

Paranormal Activity has a lot to answer for. Costing only $15,000 to make, its huge success at the box office has opened the door for a whole new kind of filmmaking to emerge on a big scale – filmmakers making films for low budgets free of interference from meddling studio executives. This is something that liberates filmmakers to make the films that they want to make without having to worry about things such as whether the property is commercially viable or casting actors who are bankable.
Skyline is one of the first of what will probably be many films to follow the example of Paranormal Activity director Oren Peli, another such film being fellow alien invasion film Monsters which is released in December – aliens being very much an in thing in Hollywood right now. Best known for directing Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem, a film which, as a result of such meddling from studio executives, didn’t entirely come out as they wanted and was not particularly well received upon its cinema release, the Brothers Strause set out to make a film completely free of such studio interference and the result is a film that they not only completely financed themselves, making the film for an alleged $10 million investment – an impressively low number for a film as effects heavy as this one – but also shot almost entirely at co-director Greg Strause’s condo building in Marina Del Ray, California. Shot entirely on the new Red cameras with the Mysterium-X chip owned by the Brothers Strause and boasting more than 800 VFX shots, the visual effects work of the Brothers Strause elsewhere has nonetheless still brought on the brunt of a big movie studio. Visual effects company Hydraulx Filmz, which is owned by Greg and Colin Strause, also did the visual effects for next year’s big action blockbuster Battle: Los Angeles, a film which sees aliens launching an invasion in Los Angeles – sound familiar? – and there is now a distinct possibility of legal action being taken by Sony Pictures against the Strause Brothers. Obviously, this is too little too late to prevent Skyline from being released but it does raise serious questions about where the brothers actually got their ideas from. There again, the concept of Skyline is hardly an original one anyway is it.

Professor Stephen Hawking famously warned that if the human race ever encounters aliens, it might be bad news for us in the way that meeting Columbus was bad news for the Native Americans. Humanity is about to experience its first encounter with alien life forms and Stephen Hawking’s warning turns out to be quite an apt one. Over the city of Los Angeles, mysterious lights have started to appear in the sky, drawing people up to them like moths to a flame. The lights seem to emanate from alien space craft, apparently intent on swallowing up all humans from the earth. Trapped in a high-rise building, a group of survivors – Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his pregnant girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson), Terry (Donald Faison) and his girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel), Denise (Crystal Reed) and Oliver (David Zayas) – fight for their lives as their world disappears before them.

If you get a sense that you’ve seen Skyline before you most definitely won’t be alone. If you’ve seen Independence Day you already have seen it. While supposedly intended to be a film about a mass alien abduction rather than an invasion per se, the parallels are so blatantly obvious as to make it clear that even if it didn’t seem like Greg and Colin Strause had stolen the idea for the film from Battle: Los Angeles, there still wouldn’t be an inkling of originality to be found here. This, however, does not diminish what these filmmakers have achieved on a very low budget. The general perception amongst movie studios seems to be that to make an effects heavy blockbuster you have to spend a lot of money and with this film the Brothers Strause show that this isn’t necessarily the case. The visual effects on display here are quite impressive, particularly for a film made on such a small production budget, and the directors deliver plenty of stunning VFX shots – the destruction of a mothership is a particularly spectacular shot – and pretty enjoyable action sequences – aerial dogfights that see fighter jets and stealth bombers take on the alien ships are particularly entertaining – as well as alien ships that look suitably threatening and giant alien beings, designed by creature design veterans Alec Gillis and Tom Woodruff Jr., that are just as much so. In particular, the sight of people being sucked up into the alien motherships is very chilling. So, the effects are of a high standard and the effects based sequences prove pretty entertaining. So far so good, but sadly there is little else truly positive that can be said about the film. Often coming across more like a show reel displaying the Brothers Strause’s visual effects abilities than a proper movie, there is no real creative flare on display on the part of the filmmakers, what we see impressive but not particularly new and all in all this is a film packed full of flash and lacking even one iota of substance. While the approach of showing everything from the perspective of the little people might seem like a good idea – it does, in some rare instances, prove effective, such as viewing events through photos taken on a camera or viewed through the eyehole of a telescope – it largely fails to turn out this way, largely due to the fact that the little people in question are uninteresting and uncharismatic individuals (and the fact that one of them is supposedly a guy who does visual effects for a living is just pointless self indulgence at its worst). The establishing character scenes that occur before the alien attack begins hold little interest to us and serve no purpose other than to (unsuccessfully) make us care about the characters, much of it seeming like it is right out of a teen drama or soap opera and even while their lives are hanging in the balance the character based stuff still fails to engage us. Much of this can be blamed on the actors, at their worst delivering the kind of acting you would expect to find in an American television soap and at their best being merely competent – it’s certainly not a good sign that I couldn’t help thinking of Donald Faison as Turk from TV’s Scrubs. The other problem is poor plotting and characterisation, the film featuring the bare minimum of plot necessary to support the effects sequences, the characters being two dimensional stereotypes and the dialogue being completely obvious and unimaginative. It is hard to care less about this aspect of the film and the lack of interesting characters or a decent plot means that the terrifying scenario at the heart of the film fails to be even remotely terrifying. Additionally, the unengaging characters make us yearn for something more than what we are getting, the setting proving to be far too limited and the only glimpses of the bigger picture coming in the form of aerial shots above Los Angeles and a few shots showing alien motherships over other recognisable cities, which clearly only feature for the sake of effects shots and not for any purpose in the storyline – what little storyline there is anyway. The plot just seems lazy, predictable and rushed – perhaps they really did steal the idea for the film and had to get a script rushed through? – and it all culminates in an ending which is frankly rather absurd. Blame screenwriters Joshua Cordes and Liam O’Donnell for the poor writing on display here. So, all in all, Skyline is not a particularly good film. It is at least successful in showing that a big budget isn’t necessary to show good visual effects but a lack of anything other than decent effects here makes for a rather shallow viewing experience. The only reason that it warrants three stars is that it has enough entertainment value that, if you leave your brain at home, it does prove to be a reasonably entertaining way to spend an hour and a half, being adequate popcorn fodder but nothing more. Also, somewhat ironically, for a film that was made without studio involvement, Skyline seems just like the kind of lazy filmmaking that some studios might actually make.

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Review by Robert Mann BA (Hons)

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