Rating: PG-13
Directors: Colin & Greg Strause ("The Brothers Strause")
Boyfriend/girlfriend Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and Elaine (Scottie Thompson) fly across country to Los Angeles to help celebrate the birthday of Jarrod's buddy Terry (Donald Faison), whose made it big and is living the life with beautiful wife Candice (Brittany Daniel). A night of partying ends in Terry making Jarrod a job offer, something Jarrod has little interest in - especially when he learns that Elaine in no way wants to relocate, and is also pregnant. The couples wind up a late night crashing in Terry's highrise apartment, along with Terry's female secretary and another male friend, and all is peaceful until 4:30 the next morning, when bright blue lights permeating the blinds throughout the apartment wake up the guy friend ... and the secretary, in time to see the guy sucked right out through the closed window. The aliens have landed, they ain't friendly - and this is pretty much the plot of Skyline, the rest of the film concerned with the characters trying to either hide out in the apartment, or find a way out when up against aliens who can practice mind control or just snatch you up whenever they find you. While the special effects and aliens are pretty impressive, sadly the same can't be said for the acting and especially script, and with the film only focusing on the main characters in the apartment, until the military shows up viewers are given no viewpoints of other characters, or even of what's going on throughout Los Angeles itself, outside of the wide-angle views of aliens jacking up the city itself. Even with that, the film focusing on just a handful of characters, you're never given enough time to know anything about them so that they come off as very stock alien-invasion-film characters - and though Jarrod and Elaine evoke a bit of sympathy, it's not enough to work up a sweat as the number of human survivors dwindles around them. The ending, convoluted as it is to try and set up a sequel, remains as run-of-the-mill as the majority of the film itself. 4/10 stars
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