Special effects galore but no story in Skyline

What do you get when you run a successful movie special effects company and want to start making your own blockbusters but you just don’t have a blockbuster budget?

If you’re Greg or Colin Strause, you crank out Skyline, ostensibly an independent feature that gives all other independents a bad name just by association. Hydraulx, their company, has been lauded for its work on such effect-laden popcorn epics as Volcano and The Day After Tomorrow but when the Brothers Strause try to take the helm, like when they directed Aliens vs. Predators: Requiem, well, let’s just say the critical reception wasn’t so rosy. Still, it made at least $150 million, once again proving that there is no accounting for taste.

Now in 2010, they have returned, directing a stinker about bad bugs from outer space. This alien invasion picture has all of the computer-generated special effects that you’d expect and desire — about 800 individual visual effects shots in total. That’s a lot by anyone’s standards, including even Roland Emmerich, but where it excels in sheer volume of otherworldly spaceships, it crashes and burns in all other areas.

The story takes place in a tall condo building in Los Angeles when the city is attacked in the middle of the night by blue light-emitting ships of extraterrestrial origin. The light has this energy-sucking power that makes whoever looks at it, come toward it and be taken away to the mother ship. There, bad things presumably happen.

A small group of people who escape the initial attack hole themselves up and try to figure out a way to sneak off to freedom. When I said that the movie is set in the condo, I meant that literally. Practically the whole film takes place inside one suite where these annoying characters come to grips with their situation while their personalities conflict with one another. If you only have $20 million to make something spectacular, you throw 99 per cent of that at the visual spectacles and then dig around in your change purse for money to get actors and screenwriters. Anyone ever heard of Joshua Cordes or Liam O’Donnell? No? That’s because they aren’t writers, they’re just grunt workers from the Hydraulx factory. Do they even know how sexist their story is by showing only the men to be the leaders and the women only as followers, passive victims to their mutual plight? What a pile of garbage.

Sadly, Skyline makes Independence Day look like Casablanca. So what if it was shot entirely on some new technological wonder called the Red camera with the Mysterium-X chip that is solely owned by the Brothers Strause? Does the audience actually know what that means or notice any difference? No. All that I noticed was how awful the movie was and how awfully long 90 minutes can feel. Even worse, the denouement cuts right off at a non-ending, obviously and unethically leading into what must certainly be part two of an expected franchise. This isn’t a cliffhanger. This is too dumb for a device like that.

Sure there’s some interesting moments and a teensy-weensy amount of story to hold people’s interest but don’t bother. We come to these movies to be entertained and there’s only so much entertainment that you can derive from watching floating shrimp-like insect ships with halogen headlights and tendril grabbers pulling some unsympathetic and unlikeable characters to their untimely demise. Honestly, I couldn’t wait for the aliens to just finish the job so that I didn’t have to watch these people any more.

What does Skyline. even mean in reference to the story? Nothing that I could discern. I’m much more interested in the threadbare budget alien movie called Monsters coming out soon and the much higher budget Battle: Los Angeles, coming out in March. I’m even contemplating watching Independence Day again just to clear my head.