Review: SKYLINE

I really do not understand why Skyline has gotten so many bad reviews. Yes, the acting sucks. Yes, the dialogue doesn’t help it at all. Yes, we have seen better special effects. And yes, it is a story we have all seen before one thousand times. But it is undeservingly filled with beautiful imagery, and such elegant style it would make experienced big-budget action directors cower with jealousy; the Strauss brothers made this movie with less than 10 million dollars. That has to count for something, or rather everything. They made it back three days after it premiered without ever being in the top five.

The plot is as simple as your average slasher film. A group of 20-somethings are stuck in a building while aliens ravage the rest of Los Angeles, gobbling up people by the thousands. The group has to get from their building to the Marina where there is a boat in which they hope to escape the city. As they run the aliens kill them off one by one. Will they get to the Marina? And there is some backstory with good drama potential but the lame acting anchors it to shit level.

At its heart Skyline is just like one of those old-school, drive-in, monster B-movies complete with the brain snatching, the ax hacking (yes there is an ax) and the cheesy love story that looks straight out of a telenovela. In other words it is silly fun. And it doesn’t pretend to be anything else. The problem is people have forgotten that these types of movies used to be popular and that they have a charm derived from its own silliness. But what is impressive in Skyline is that the filmmakers, while aware of this, transcend and actually manage to take themselves seriously as they make a good B movie.

So to wrap up: there is very little that I can say was good in Skyline: the plot is average, the acting is quite bad, and the dialogue even worse. The special effects are as good as they are going to get 10 million dollar budget (which is still better than a lot which I’ve seen in 100 million dollar budgets). But nevertheless this movie is FREAKING FUN! RELLY FUN in its own B-movie way. So I can still safely recommend it and know that you won’t be disappointed. But I can not respectfully bring myself to give it anything above a decent grade.