'Skyline' is cheap thrills from bored special effects

John Serba | By John Serba |
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on November 12, 2010 at 2:45 PM, updated November 12, 2010 at 3:41 PM
skyline.jpgFighter jets attack an alien ship over the city of Los Angeles in the sci-fi thriller "Skyline."

Where's Godzilla when you need him?

Some of us would rather see men in cheesy rubber suits mash toy-model buildings than the modern equivalent, CGI beasts destroying CGI cityscapes. But here's "Skyline," which looks shiny and new, but at its core, is the same as the old Japanese monster movies. We get the cheapest of thrills from them, watching cities get razed as puny humans and their pointless weapons blast away at malevolent beasts.

Where "Skyline" differs is in tone. It's poker-faced serious and mistakenly believes we're interested in the puny human drama among the small group of survivors who populate the narratives of movies like this. As if we're buying a ticket to see Eric Balfour and Scottie Thompson emote -- poorly -- and not to watch ugly ETs with multiple blue halogen eyeballs bring about the apocalypse.

Surprisingly, much of the film is spent inside an apartment in a Los Angeles high-rise. Jarrod (Balfour) and pregnant girlfriend Elaine (Thompson) are visiting his rich actor buddy Terry (Donald Faison), whose witchy significant other Candice (Brittany Daniel) and personal assistant/mistress Denise (Crystal Reed) don't care for each other. After a night of heavy partying, rumbling and eerie lights disrupt their passed-outedness. They're heeeeeeere!

Some of the gargoylean things fly and probe buildings with their tentacles. Our protagonists hide behind kitchen counters and window blinds, and the monsters buzz by. All that technology to fly across the galaxy in a goliath spaceship, and the aliens can't break a window and peer around the window dressing. Eventually, the humans try to escape the building, and learn that the monsters like to rip their heads off and swallow their brains whole. So back up to the apartment they go.

While enduring "Skyline," many other films came to mind: "War of the Worlds," "Signs," "Starship Troopers," "Cloverfield," "The Matrix," "Independence Day," "District 9." All of them are superior, by varying degrees, and at least have a distinct point-of-view, lacking here. We see much of the action third-person from the high-rise window, while the actors stand slack-jawed, bickering about whether they should try to escape or sit tight behind the mini blinds. It's more tiresome than thrilling.

A November release lends "Skyline" box-office gravitas it doesn't deserve. It's a low-budget B-movie, and it looks and acts like one. And even then, it doesn't feature enough creature action to satisfy our base desires. Its unintentional camp -- evident by lousy performances, gross logical discrepancies, a nonsensical ending which leaves room for a sequel, the desire to yell instructions at the characters -- keeps it afloat. The running joke here is that the pinhead principals keep bolting to and from the apartment, as if a half-foot-thick wall will protect them from annihilative whatnots from outer space. Frankly, they deserve to have their brains shplupped out.

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