If you ever find yourself in the position where you need a massively boring cliff notes version of every sci-fi alien invasion movie ever made carried out with terrible writing but looks pretty then look no further than Skyline. It looks really good, is shot well, and is so boring and contrived I wanted to walk out in the first 25 minutes…and then every minute after that until the credits rolled. They had a bit of action during the credits based on the very wrong headed conceit that people would give a damn but I couldn’t get out of the theater fast enough.

Giving a plot synopsis seems silly because you have seen everything before but here goes. You have Jarrod (Eric Balfour), a struggling artist, and his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson), who doesn’t seem to do anything but be pregnant and get into arguments with Jarrod, who go to visit Jarrod’s friend Terry (Donald Faison) a now successful special effects supervisor who lives in a phat apartment in LA and HIS girlfriend Candice (Brittany Daniel) who’s only job seems to be smoking and being pissed that Terry is plowing his personal assistant Denise (Crystal Reed) who’s job is to stupidly photograph Terry plowing her so that Candice can find it later. Also to get plowed by Terry. When Jarrod gets to LA, Terry’s douche bag business partner lets slip that they want to hire Jarrod to work for them which pisses Elaine off because she feels like he knew about this and was springing it on her and then felt pretty justified springing her pregnancy on hizzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz…oh sorry, I fell asleep there for a second. Where was I? Oh yeah, then aliens show up and start harvesting people for their brain stems because the aliens seem to be powered by humans and need to recharge their bio-mechanical bodies with more human brain stems. No seriously.

Before I get to how badly paced, scripted and executed this thing is I have to address how stupid it is to have aliens who we have never seen before (and by this I mean people in the movie. Anyone watching the movie saw these in the Matrix when they were called ‘squiddies’) who have evolved to be dependent on and be powered by human brain stems. How does that work? Is this the first time that they needed a recharge and if it is, how did they know where to find our brains and how could they have possibly evolved to live in this manner anyway? The aliens are completely stupid on their face and you would think that it would be the sort of thing professional filmmakers would have noticed.

The backstory on this movie is that it was made by a special effects house who was also doing effects for another alien invasion film, Battle: Los Angeles without disclosing to Sony that they were doing a film just like it on their own. Sony is rumored to have been/still are looking for legal remedies against directors ‘the Brothers Strause’ (that is about the douchiest sounding name to give yourself ever btw) for this. So the reason I bring this up is that not only do the effects and designs for both films look pretty similar but also that the Strause brothers are special effects guys who decided to put some money together, hire some TV actors and film a movie in one their condos. There is something kind of impressive about just sitting down and saying ‘lets do this’ and then pulling it off but it would have been nice if they were in any way competent at anything other than the special effects.

While I think the designs are obviously cribbed from the Matrix, Independence Day and Cloverfield and the shots and camera set ups were stolen straight from everything from War of the Worlds to the first Transformers movie, Skyline looks very pretty. It looks very crisp and clear and the effects are always convincing. I am impressed that they did such good work there while at the the same time bungling just about everything else involved.

I like Eric Balfour, Donald Faison and David Zayas, who shows up a little later to do not much but argue with Jarrod, but there is nothing they can do for this material. The best actors in the world couldn’t make this worthwhile. There is only so much you can do with bad scripting and they do a valiant job of trying to elevate but there is really nothing to be done.

Probably the biggest problem with this film is the pacing and how boring it is. Part of this is that there are only so many times we can watch this kind of rehashed shit with a straight face but most of it is the incompetent pacing. It drags so much in the beginning while the directors are trying to make us care about the characters and failing spectacularly that when we are watching these people who have just annoyed us for a half an hour continue to annoy us while aliens are killing everyone. When you are rooting for the brain steam eating knockoffs from better movies then you know that something has gone horribly wrong.

Watching Skyline, you can see that the directors know what to do to make a compelling suspense movie and it is very obvious that they have watched a lot of them but what they deliver is a paint-by-numbers version that goes through the motions but does it incompetently. There are a lot of false startles and a lot of scenes where things happen surprisingly but then they keep doing these things over and over to the point where it no longer matters and you just want them to get on with it. These missteps just kill the movie because you already don’t give a shit about anyone in it and you are already bored by shots you have seen before done much better but then you are forced to endure ‘action’ scenes that drag and bore by repeating themselves.

Also the ending is super fucking stupid.

Conclusion [4.0 out of 10]

There are plenty of bad movies, particularly alien invasion movies, but what makes Skyline so hard to watch is that it isn’t even a funny bad movie, it is just boring. How you can have the events that happen in the movie be boring is beyond me but I literally started thinking about how I needed to change my cats’ litter boxes and that I needed to go shopping for a new night stand during one of the big action scenes in the movie. When you would rather think about cat shit than the aliens attack movie that you are watching, you know that the movie must be an even stinkier piece of shit than what your cat has left behind for you.