Skyline is absolute excrement

I've been involved in a couple of pitches for films now, low budget shorts, purely in a behind the scenes capacity. I've readied storyboards location photographs, financial assessment expenditure reports and I have printed final drafts of scripts on extremely expensive paper and arranged them in a professionally presentable manner for a filmmaker to take in to his first meeting with potential producers/financiers and charm them with his ideas and my hard work.

I can only assume that that is also done, on a much bigger scale obviously, in Hollywood. For the movie I've just seen, I imagine that directors The Brothers Strause [AvP: Requiem] brought in an impressive special effects reel to the executive in Relativity Media who gave the green light to Skyline. The problem is that there is a moment after receiving a perfectly administered blowjob that a man will agree to anything... literally ANYTHING! It was at this moment, [probably because his secretary was still under his desk] that the executive gave the nod to The Brothers Strauss to make their alien invasion movie because no matter how good the effects are, if NOTHING else about this film has been thought of, then you have a lemon, and there has to be an excuse why the executive didn't read the script.

The special effects in this movie are some of the finest I've seen in cinema. No one can say that The Brothers Strause can't do effects work because the stuff on screen here was flawlessly executed and if they hadn't blatantly ripped off every other alien invader design from far better alien invader movies, they might have had something. Speilberg's War of the Worlds, The Matrix Reloaded, Independence Day, District 9 and even the video game Crysis had their designs plundered by the brothers which is very sad considering their talent for CGI. They seem to be excellent at realising the ideas of others, but lack any imagination whatsoever to create something themselves and sadly this exceptional character flaw infected their movie like Ebola.

Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Donald Faison and David Zayas are the big C-list names that The Brothers Strauss conned into starring in this movie. I'll forgive anyone for not knowing who the fuck they are because I actually had to look up their names. Balfour was Milo the tech with the big nose in 24 in '07. Thompson was Tony's sexy-eyed love interest in NCIS season 4. Faison was Turk on Scrubs and Zayas was last seen as General Garza in The Expendables. I've seen these actors perform their roles admirably before, so I'm going to blame first-time screenwriters Liam O'Donnell and Joshua Cordes [who are both VFX supervisors in The Brothers Strause' company Hydralux] for the most abysmal script and dialog of the year, and the brothers themselves for not learning anything from criticism of AvP:R and continuing to apply their complete ineptitude to directing human beings. They can't do it, they'll never do it because they are so utterly, utterly shit at it.

Balfour and Thompson play a New York couple who visit their extraordinarily shallow friends in a Los Angeles apartment block. After a night of partying and boozing aliens attack and begin sucking up the citizens of L.A. into their ships. Our thoroughly loathsome protagonists are thrust into a situation with which the audience can only meet with apathy because we just don't give a fuck about these unlikable self-centered wankers. They do a lot of talk about an escape on a yacht [naturally they have a yacht] and when they finally do get mobile they're stopped before leaving the car park because The Bothers Strauss want to keep their costs down by only shooting in their own apartment [I'm not joking, the entire movie is set in one of the director's apartments and on his roof]. So then they retreat back inside and barricade themselves in waiting for a rescue because after all, they're not really the kind of people who would go and fight for their lives if they can help it.

If you want to see good alien invasion movie you won't find it here so I suggest your best bet it to wait until next March when Battle: Los Angles comes out. That's a big budget production from Sony pictures with Aaron The Dark Knight Eckhart and Michelle Avatar Rodriguez and will follow a platoon of U.S. Marines and Black Hawk Down style action as opposed to a group of exhaustingly boring assholes running around an apartment complex. But Battle: L.A. has something else going for it: It has special effects done by a couple of the best special effects people in the business, The Brothers Strause!!!! That's right, the brothers have pissed off Sony by releasing Skyline months before Battle: L.A. and not telling Sony that they were working on their own Los Angeles alien invasion movie beforehand. If they weren't VFX geniuses, I'm guessing they'd never find work again.

Final Verdict: Magnificent, flawless and sublime visual effects. But a boring, derivative, stupid and generally unentertaining piece of shit otherwise.

Colonel Creedon Rating: *