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You have to give Greg and Colin Strause credit for thinking outside the box. The Brothers Strause can be innovative when they want to be and if nothing else, Skyline has a few surprises. Not among them is the fact that it absolutely sucks.
Watching Strause Bros. movies is metformin 500 mg price like imagining what would happen if a pretentious, hormonally-imbalanced, sixteen-year-old film blogger was given access to his dad’s movie making machine and told he could make whatever he wants. Want to nuke a whole city and the entire cast at the end just because it sounds cool and no one else has the balls to do it? Sure! Go ahead. Want to jettison all semblance of a plot structure and character development for attempted edgy personal drama that never amounts to anything? Why not, as long as the special effects are good. It’s just more of the same with Skyline, the Strause’s follow up to the lousy, but profitable Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem. I guess this is what you get when two special effects artists are allowed to make their own films without an understanding of the other aspects of filmmaking.
Skyline opens with one of the main characters being woken up by a strange blue light. He looks outside to check on it and his face starts to disfigure as the light hypnotizes him and lures him forward. We then cut to the same character and his girlfriend getting off an airplane fifteen hours earlier. No more than fifteen minutes later do we end up right back at the same scene we opened at. This is a perfect example of the lazy, “do these guys even care?” thinking that went into this film. Usually when a movie opens with a scene from later on in the film and then flashes back in time it is to foreshadow something important or establish a mood and framework for the preceding events. This scene in Skyline does neither. It’s just there and makes everything all the more confusing when you realize that its inclusion at the beginning is entirely pointless.
The film follows Jared, the character we are introduced to in the opener, and his girlfriend, Elaine, who are on vacation to Los Angeles to visit his longtime friend and Hollywood spfx artist, Terry, played hilariously against type by Scrubs’ Donald Faison. Not only did the Strause Bros. make one of the principal players a spfx technician, but they dress him up like a rapper and give him a hot piece of bikini-clad arm candy for a wife who he lives with in a luxurious high-rise. I guess this is supposed to be how they envision their own life. Oh yeah, he also has a cute, but uglier than his wife, booty-maid that lives with them too… And he’s secretly fucking her. Don’t worry though, that little development goes literally nowhere. Right before the alien ships arrive, Elaine tells Jared that she’s pregnant and he doesn’t even pretend to be the least bit happy about it. This also goes unused up until a climax that is so beyond stupid I can’t believe it made it onscreen. There is also an extremely agitated security guard who sticks around for a while, but his presence is awkwardly inserted into the story and he seems like he’s reading all of his lines from the book of stereotypical Hollywood bad-asses.
Skyline is not all bad though. The effects are generally convincing and the action sequences are kind of interesting. The big problem with the action is that we never step outside our core group of characters inside the high-rise, so there are no faces behind the destruction and chaos to make us care. The highlight for me was when a squadron of unmanned Air Force drones blows through the alien attackers to launch a nuclear missile at the mother ship. Yep, the Brothers Strause nuked a city again. That makes twice in two films. This was one of the few scenes that held much tension and I’ll admit that any time jets fly in heroically to save the day is pretty damn cool to watch. Though I enjoyed it, the nuke scene confused me. The explosion created a mushroom cloud and caused a visible shockwave, but it didn’t so much as blow dust off the windows of the building our characters are in and they were not at all far from the targeted ship. It could conceivably have been a very low-yield weapon, but it comes across as just another oversight.
The aliens themselves in Skyline are still a bit of a mystery. A mother ship, flying probes, and all other forms of spacecraft are everywhere, but the extra terrestrials behind them are nowhere to be seen. We see a giant monster alien, but I doubt that was supposed to be what was piloting the ship. The probes that fly around scanning for and collecting humans could have perhaps been the alien species seeing as they function by way of stolen human brains, but I honestly could not tell. That’s another problem with Skyline: we never learn why they are attacking Earth. I can gather from a few scenes that they abduct us to harvest our brains, but this is never clarified. Perhaps they came to investigate Elaine (Scottie Thompson) for looking like some sort of curious, hybrid-cross between Olivia Wilde and Elizabeth Banks.
Coming out of the theater Skyline left me feeling exactly as I expected to. Anyone who has seen the trailers or is familiar with the Brothers Strause knows what they are in for. I thought about giving the film a score of five including an added point for some unusually creative ideas, but I reconsidered because there is no benefit to thinking outside the box when the box is only half-full to begin with. I really hope the Strause’s try their hand at a romantic comedy someday just so I can see a guy nuke his pregnant girlfriend for cheating on him with a famous magazine editor or something. Until then, consider me unimpressed.
Overall: 4/10
Directed by Greg and Colin Strause. Written by Joshua Cordes and Liam O’Donnell. Production Design by Drew Dalton. Cinematography by Michael Watson. Original Music by Mathew Margeson. Edited by Nicholas Wayman-Harris.
Starring: Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Donald Faison, David Zayas, Brittany Daniel, and Crystal Reed.
