SKYLINE Post Release Discussion

Anyone, anyone at all?

OK, this film which is featured in the centre of the advertising on this site is obviously showing very little interest, especially if I ended up starting a thread for it, I really did wait and look for one for quite a while.

Anyway, here's my two cents for what it's worth. I enjoyed it. Funnily enough, all the vitriol the bandwagon was heaping on it paradoxically made me more likely to want to see it after the initial hook of the trailers. I figured there was a good chance it would be mediocre or even bad but to make a film as appallingly bad as a lot of reviews were making out actually is quite difficult to stand out of the pack Uwe Boll notwithstanding.

I agree that the first hour of the pacing is quite off. They should have cut all of the 15 hours earlier material and just gone from the start of the alien invasion. It would have made the film barely over an hour but there's a German zombie film called Rammbock which is only 64 minutes and getting good reviews and to be honest, Skyline is like an episode of a scifi tv show. I think the reviews would be more objective if it was looked at as if it was the pilot/first episode of Skyline: The TV Series (and I'm not saying TV has lower standards than film, far from it).

As for criticisms of the plot, I didn't think the characters did anything particularly stupid under the situation. The idea of escaping out to sea is getting a lot of ridicule but makes sense. The aliens are attacking cities where there are a lot of people and it is the fastest way for the characters to get out of there. It's not unreasonable to think that the aliens will be concentrating on the areas where there are a lot of people for a while longer yet so hiding in the relative emptiness of the city makes sense (it may turn out to be wrong but not unreasonable).

As for 'that' ending, well it's not like they didn't set up the possibility that something would be different for our hero all through the film, I thought of it as being since he wasn't sucked into the sky straight away after 'seeing the light', he had a chance to build up some kind of 'immunity' which enabled him to keep his own identity. It wasn't that far out of left field really. I do agree the end of the film after that was a bit too abrupt though.

I liked the alien designs, one of the creatures definitely reminded me of something similar from Half Life. I enjoyed the sky battles (that stealth fighter pilot pulled of some great moves) and the hand to hand with aliens was very good FX. It was nice to see aliens a bit more well 'alien', using organic designs as opposed to metal spaceships and so on (I know it's not the first time by far of course).

Anyway, I found it good enough to take my mind off a Japanese test I totally bombed. I give Skyline a solid 2/5, maybe even 2.5/5 (I mark hard) though I think maybe for most people here, it might be better off as a rental/on demand/borrowed for free from someone else who paid for it - with judicious use of the fast forward button.

Final verdict: I thought it was OK, not the absolute depths of creative desolation people made it out to be for me anyway.

P.S The Strause brothers have a nice apartment in a nice building.

OK, I'll try and see if I can clarify what I meant. Skyline to me felt like episode one of a TV Show where if I treated it that not much was going to be revealed in this 'first episode' and more information would be forthcoming in 'later episodes'. It did make it feel a bit more watchable for me seeing it like that, since the whole set up was a narrow one from a limited perspective that obviously wasn't going to tell us much.

Which I admit is not ideal since it's going to be two years to the sequel as opposed to a new episode next week.

Also, when I said "more objectively", I should probably said more "in context" (also by saying seen 'more objectively', I don't mean less harshly). There's a lot of dud stuff in it.

They could have saved a few hundred thousand I guess by scrapping all the scenes prior to the attack for starters. It also really would have helped with some better acting from the cast, or more likely better actors as it did frequently came across as stilted and forced (realistically, I guessed if you filmed a disaster, people would act more like they did in the film than anything else but who wants to pay to see that?) - they should especially just merged the two roles of Donald Faison's girlfriend and employee into one character.

I guess the money saved if they did that could have hired a better cast and some sharper editing of what would be left could have made it more watchable at no extra cost - but it would have been quite a bit shorter and below that arbitrary movie length threshold.

Ideally with what footage we have got, it'd be seen back to back with Skyline 2 and skipping everything before the lights in the sky start falling at 4.27am. It'd probably be best edited into one film to be honest.

It's not really that compelling an argument to see it at all to be honest when I put it like that now that I think about it.