No R rated movie has ever sucked!
Two different movie types. Shit like this deserves to be rated R.
Heh. The dude from Dexter, the dude from 24, the dude from Scrubs, the chick from Sons of Anarchy. ALL STAR CAST, PEOPLE.
God I hope Battle:LA is at least entertaining.
If you are talking about the girlfriend of the dude from 24, she’s not the chick from Sons of Anarchy. She’s the chick who guest starred on NCIS for awhile.
SPOILERS HO!
“OK, so brain-sucking aliens invade L.A…”
This film should’ve been D.O.A. as soon as whoever made the pitch uttered those words. Sadly, some coke-addled movie exec actually greenlit this absurd monstrosity. That’s time, energy, and money wasted by the cast & crew which could’ve gone towards something more worthwhile, such as burning $100 bills to help keep homeless cats warm.
I could deconstruct the plot’s many many failings, but honestly why put more thought into tearing it down than went into making it? Let’s just say had I invented a drinking game - any drinking game - while watching this film, I would’ve been dead from alcohol poisoning before hitting the 45-min. mark.
Bear in mind: I presumed this movie would be terrible before I saw it. No, its sin is far graver - it was boring.
It isn’t tense nor scary. It’s mostly unexciting except for a few decent SFX shots. The characters are one-note caricatures and I do not give a fig if they live or die, much less care about their supposed “problems” before the invasion begins. Their “plans” are so moronic that you thank Darwin for natural selection thinning the herd. If there’s a cliche they missed, it was only because they ran out of runtime. Skyline is War of the Worlds’s retarded cousin; and considering some people thought WotW was Independence Day’s retarded cousin*, that says a lot.
Ironically, the film ends just when it was about to get interesting. Screw the alien invasion crap, imagine all the wacky hijinks our not-so-happy couple could have now that Eric Balfour has the body of an alien monstrosity: marriage counseling, PTA meetings, Little League games - the possibilities are limitless!
*My apologies to anyone with relatives suffering from mental disabilities whom I have insulted by comparing them to this film. It’s just I don’t know a better word for summing up just how idiotic this film is: lobotomized? trepanned? decapitated?
The whole movie was about people going out in blazes of glory and then the movie going HA HA HA NEENER NEENER THE JOKE IS ON YOU!
This movie even made going out in a blaze of glory lame. Well done, Skyline!
I just saw Monsters and Skyline back to back. Of the two, Monsters was definitely the more boring, because nothing happened there. Skyline had stuff going on, but it made less sense (aliens are doing flybys all over the city looking for people - lets all stay in the room with the huge window where they can easily spot us and grab us).
I can’t say which one I’m more sorry to have wasted my time on.
My wife and I selected this pile of shit from On Demand a few weeks ago. If there was a way to make these aliens actually brain harvest everyone involved with the making of this dog turd I would cheer them on
Finally saw this, and perhaps it was because my expectations were low due to all the hate or because my expectations were merely “aliens show up and fuck shit up” but I found the movie entertaining. The very very end of the movie was lame, but other than that I had a lot of fun watching it. It’s on Netflix Instant now.
I just watched this on Netfix. Between this an Battle LA, I’m going to have to give the slight edge to the movie with Eckhart and Rodriguez. This was really dumb.
Wife and I watched this the other night and it was probably the worst movie we’ve seen in a while. It’s almost funny, but the thing that annoyed me the most was Terry and Jarrod talking multiple times about what Terry does and some job offer that he was extending to Jarrod, but I had no clue what either was. My best guess after some bit of dialogue about the “computer is just a tool” is that Terry works in the special effects business.
Terry works in special effects, specifically in movies (they talk about robot fights and a director). Jarrod is a photographer, which I assume because they talk about him having an “eye” and he has a camera with a big lens on it that he takes to the roof when they initially go up there.
Just saw this today. This was my reaction, though downgrade “entertaining” to “not entirely unenjoyable.” I was looking forward to aliens ruining the day of characters I actively disliked, and that’s just what happened.
I was pissed off at the bait and switch it pulled right at the beginning, though. The movie starts with the invasion right off the bat, and I thought, “Well awesome, at least it gets to the action quickly,” and then…
“15 hours earlier.”
… son of a BITCH.
I just saw this over the weekend (as part of a double feature with “Never Let Me Go”) and I agree it was as horrible as everyone’s making it out to be. Given how horrible I had heard it was, I was surprised the CGI was reasonably good. So maybe if they need a quote for the DVD box I would be glad to say “The CGI didn’t suck as much as the rest of the movie.”
There was speculation this was a setup for a sequel… odds of that happening?
According to Box Office Mojo, it has a production budget of $10million and it made $21million in the US and $45million elsewhere. Pretend they spent $10million in marketing and you still have a $40+ million profit… so, sure… I believe less successful movies have had sequels.
Very good according to the Brothers Strause. Keep in mind that the movie made a lot more than it cost and the brothers own the SFX studio. The movie cost $500K for the actual produstion and another $10 million for marketing.
As of December 11 the film had made $21,393,620 in the United States and $43,677,358 internationally for a worldwide total of $73,950,941
The brothers say they will release the sequel independently. I think that’s a threat.
The Strause brothers, who directed the film, are both FX guys; I would’ve been more surprised if they didn’t at least get that part right.
OK, in terms of what they achieved visually for that money, it’s quite impressive. Now partner them up with a director as good as, say, early Robert Rodriguez and maybe they could put out a great-looking yet low-budget scifi film which doesn’t suck.
Well, the closest analogue to Skyline was Battle LA, which their company Hydraulx coincidentally also did effects work for. In fact, Sony suspected that the brothers funded Skyline with the retainer payment for work on Battle LA, which would’ve been a clear violation of their contract. I believe this was settled in arbitration.
Beyond that they did contract SFX work for Titanic, Avatar, Aliens vs Predator, 300, Fantastic Four, and a host of other films.
Saw this finally on Netflix streaming over the weekend. I went in with super low expectations and essentially just wanted to see the special effects and laugh at how bad the plot was.
I came away more entertained that I expected to be. The special effects absolutely made this movie, frankly I’m astounded that they were able to get such high quality visual effects on such a shoestring budget. Also, while the acting between characters was awful, the acting between people and aliens (in other words the greenscreen work) was decent and looked believeable (again a nod to the effects guys running the show). As stated above by many others, I found the ending to be pretty poor, as if they just sort of ran out of ideas and said screw it, let’s just do this. My wife also found the end disturbing for it’s graphic content.
Given that it was only 90 minutes long, I’m not sorry I watched it. I got the feeling that the whole movie was more of a portfolio piece than anything, something the Strause brothers can point to and say “look how good that looks for the limited budget we had, don’t you want us on your movie now?”. It also helped considerably that I find Scottie Thompson (Elaine) attractive, as when things got slow or crappy I could just concentrate on how amazingly beautiful her eyes are.
IMDB has an entry for Skyline 2, so there must be at least a solid rumor that it’s in development.
I disagree on the actor to alien interaction, it looked terrible to me. There wasn’t a good 1:1 correlation between the movements of the two, for example when douchebag goatee guy decides to hit the alient with his fist and then pull and tear at it – it looks disconnected.