Skyline is the sort of cheap knock-off that was once churned regularly by Roger Corman's New World Pictures. Nowadays, it's the type of movie you'd see in the discount bins at Big Lots or airing at 2AM on the Sci-Fi Channel (or SyFy).
Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) arrive in Los Angeles to celebrate the birthday of Jarrod's best friend, Terry (Donald Faison). Terry is now a big shot in Hollywood and wants Jarrod to move out there to work as a special effects wizard, but Elaine is reluctant. Meanwhile, Terry has been cheating on his girlfriend, Candice (Brittany Daniel) with his assistant, Denise (Crystal Reed). All this Gossip Girl soap opera stuff becomes moot when the aliens arrive. After a wild party, Jarrod wakes up at 4AM to see an ominous blue light piercing the previously quiet night. Humans are moths to the flame allowing the alien mothership to suck in the hapless Earthlings as if they were specks of dust.
Skyline is wholly derivative of practically every sci-fi film of the last several years. The basic premise takes the widescreen mayhem of Independence Day and crosses it with the street level point-of-view of films such as Cloverfield and District 9. The action is shot in a similar manner to Michael Bay's Transformers. The alien sentries with their undulating tentacles look an awful lot like the Sentinels from the Matrix movies.
The story itself is laughably inept, full of cardboard characters and tedious dialogue. Most of the movie consists of the protagonists hiding out in a spacious condo while the audience is forced to listen to them bitch about their meaningless personal lives. Everything is so ultra-serious that you can't even enjoy the movie on an unintentionally camp level.
This shouldn't be surprising since Skyline was written and directed by the Brothers Strause, who were also behind the atrocious Alien/Predator: Requeim. The behind-the-scenes controversy that the Strauses have created has been more intriguing than the actual movie. Skyline is the first of two alien invasion films set in L.A. The second is next year's Battle: Los Angeles, which takes more of a Black Hawk Down approach to the concept. The special effects house run by the Strauses worked on Battle: Los Angeles and are now being sued by Sony.
The CGI in Skyline looks like it would have commanded a high price tag, but the production budget was a mere $10 million. The extraterrestrials and their spacecrafts look extremely convincing, but none of that matters when the rest of the movie is so God awful.
Rating: * (*****)
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