Skyline: the Big Screen Version of Getting a Urethral Swab

You should definitely go see the sci-fi thriller Skyline…but only if you gouge your eyes out with a fork beforehand, however, or intend to watch a private viewing with all the female AVN award winners for the year. Barring one of these two contingencies, avoid it.

It’s our fault, really, that we’re even able to write this review. We read a preview a while back about Skyline that described it as “Blackhawk Down meets War of the Worlds”. Foolishly, we went by that description (which was apparently written by someone who watched an early showing of the movie while doped up on PCP, immediately after suffering traumatic brain injury) and of course the previews—which, predictably, are actually better to watch than the movie itself, because at least you won’t have lost an hour and a half of your life nor paid any money for involuntary IQ reduction.

We’ll give you a rundown. There’s an artist guy you’re supposed to like but have a hard time identifying with, with a girlfriend who is kinda hot but isn’t hot enough to salvage any of this movie’s scenes, ever (not her fault, no one would be), meets up with a smug musician guy we’re supposed to also kind of identify with because he’s made it big and is their best friend (or at least the best friend of the poor bastard named after the Subway spokesman). This guy has a girlfriend that may be the only decently cast character in the whole movie—she’s a fake-baked over-tanned shallow bitchy blonde, and actually manages to pull that off. As or the other characters…

Actually, you know what? The characters don’t matter, because they all suck. The dialogue is stilted and either pallid or melodramatic, depending upon the specific scene, and there’s only about 8 or 10 of them in the whole movie anyway. The one character that seems like he’s not a pussy and is the kind we’d like to be pulling for in a class warfare or documentary situation is grossly overshadowed by the trite one-liners someone was paid way too much money to write. Now, the monsters are kind of cool, if they look cobbled together from a couple other sci-fi movies or three, and if you don’t mind the noises they make (sort of a strange combination of Transformers, the robot squid from The Matrix and the giant robots in that last Terminator movie). Unfortunately, cool monster scenes can’t counterbalance a plot line and script that wouldn’t make the cut in a Saturday night SyFy flick or even a Ben Ten episode.

To be fair, there are some good fight scenes with the Air Force, Army and Marines…but wait, if you took some of the scenes from Independence Day and replaced the F-18s with stealth aircraft and UAVs they would be pretty much the same. Same with the ones from War of the Worlds. Of course, the giant spaceships are cool…except they too are invulnerable to everything we’ve got in our arsenal (including nukes), though in this movie they don’t catch cold and you can’t upload a virus with a Macbook and shut ‘em down.

There are a couple of good scenes with Army and Marine grunts. At one point, for about a minute and a half, it was cool. They were rocking aliens with M4s, Barretts, mini-guns and AT4, though purists (or anyone with a brain) may take issue with the Marine NCO bellowing “Reload soldier!” at his Marines.

Don’t even bother renting this or queuing it on Netflix unless you just want it playing in the background while you play pool in the garage for background noise. Do not, upon pain of cinematic lobotomy, watch it and expect to enjoy it.

The two best parts of the movie were when the giant blue lightning vacuum cleaners suck a bunch of people up and when it’s finally over.

Luckily, they’re making a sequel already, which may do something to salvage the [spoiler] ending and the wondrous orange glowing brain. Maybe the hero-turned-alien can hook up with that shrimp-alien guy from District 9 and get a little face time in the upcoming Battle for LA…one can only hope. We thought about going to see it a second time to see if we just missed something of redeeming value, but…do you really need Chlamydia a second time to know it really sucks?

Mad Duo Out!