And as Elaine lies prone and gooey on the deck of the alien craft, Jarrod’s brain is unceremoniously torn from his skull, his body thrown onto a heap of other human corpses.īut wait! Just as it appears that all is lost, and that the pregnant Elaine is doomed to suffer a hideous fate at the hands of her captors, Jarrod’s brain is inserted into the cranium of a dormant xenomorph. Skyline’s bickering couple, Jarrod and Elaine (Eric Balfour and Scotty Thompson, respectively), having spent an hour-and-a-half hidden from the aliens, are finally beamed aboard the invaders’ mothership. In either case, it’s hilarious, and hints at a sequel, or at least a spin-off videogame. I still haven’t worked out whether it’s audacious or simply inept. The lack of logic behind this idea makes my eyes water (why would aliens need human brains for energy?), and seems to serve no purpose other than to justify Skyline‘s alarmingly left-field ending.Īh yes, the ending. I thought at first that they simply ate them, but it later turns out that they use them as an energy source, as they did in The Matrix. So mysterious and unsettling early on (the question of what the aliens want with approximately 3.69 million Californians is a brilliantly provocative little mystery), it’s revealed these highly evolved beings are only after one thing: juicy human brains.Įven now, I’m still at a loss to explain what they need them for. Then there are the bizarre motivations of the aliens mentioned earlier. That Skyline‘s directors had to find creative ways of keeping the scope of the film small is understandable, given their lack of funds.īut to have such a dramatically static plot, where characters essentially run on the spot until they’re killed, seemingly at random, is a serious flaw. That a nuclear bomb can go off without even cracking a window of the apartment building in which Skyline is set is (just about) forgiveable. It’s fortunate that Skyline was made outside the Hollywood studio system, since most Tinsel Town producers would have read the script, held it up to the light, and then set fire to it. The credits roll a few minutes thereafter. Then they go upstairs, where they’re finally captured in a blaze of light. Frightened, they head back to the flat again. They get scared, and scurry back to the apartment. Then they pluck up the courage to go upstairs for a better look. Skyline‘s characters spend hours hiding from the invasion under a coffee table in their flat. Then there’s the plot, which literally goes nowhere. In fact, Skyline is essentially Hollyoaks with aliens. The flat, perfunctory script that fritters away any feeling of tension with pointless arguments and the kind of relationship issues you’d turn off Hollyoaks to avoid. Their ships are either vast and baroque, or small and squid-like, hurtling around with their eerie blue lights on full beam. The aliens are quite fascinating, even if the influences of Independence Day, Cloverfield and numerous other sci-fi staples are all too obvious. What’s so frustrating about Skyline is that it’s not an irredeemably bad film. I’ve driven my girlfriend to distraction with my endless complaints about the film’s continuity errors and baffling logic. I’ve sculpted a model of a human brain out of mashed potato. I’ve been moaning about Skyline to anyone who will listen ever since. Since I wrote my review on Friday, which I deliberately kept as spoiler-free as I could, the film’s been quietly percolating in my mind, like the image of Devils Tower that haunts Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters Of The Third Kind. Skyline is so bizarre, in fact, that I’ve taken the slightly odd step of writing about it twice. These two disparate scenarios come together in Skyline, a film that, despite the cautious optimism its marketing invoked, proves to be one of the most strange, unintentionally funny films to appear this year. It’s your opportunity to redeem yourself, to prove to the world that you can direct an effective, entertaining science fiction movie competently, and on a shoe-string budget. Somehow, you manage to get the funds together to create an alien invasion movie outside the interference of the Hollywood system. Your reputation has taken a bit of a kicking after the debacle that was Aliens Vs Predator – Requiem, a film that succeeded in sullying two much-loved franchises at the same time, and enraged an entire planet’s worth of film-obsessed geeks.
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