I contemplated for a grand total of 12 hours if I should be blogging about this movie. The sci-fi fanatic in me caved in to my more critical side, so excuse me if the piece seems somewhat incoherent to your own experience watching Skyline, the latest B-grade movie with a “modest” budget of 10 million bucks.
(Warning: Potential spoilers ahead)
What I Love About Skyline
From the Independence Day-like CGI sequence (hovering gigantic alien spaceship over big cities – and hello Hong Kong was in the movie!), the Alien-like extraterrestrial creatures, to the heinous body-and-mind takeover ala Resident Evil, Skyline was (dare I say it) a beautiful tapestry of what I loved about the scifi genre. It has more than just a whiff of War of the Worlds to it; humans were harvested for their brains.
Okay, I am very close to giving too many spoilers away, but if you have loved the movies I quoted above, Skyline is a must-watch.
And now…
What I Hate About Skyline
Oh, cheesy lines. How very cheesy, like eating a pizza in the cinema. As cheesy as the punchline before this sentence, Skyline was that bad. Pointless dramatic fillers (unfaithful husbands, anyone?), amateur acting, poor screenplay… all point towards a disaster of a movie. I suspect has this been a Spielberg’s creation, it would have been a masterpiece.
So why did the audience over at Rotten Tomatoes loved it?
You Gotta Love A Good Bad Movie
Skyline has all the recipes for a great movie AND also a bad one. Combined, it offered a breathe of fresh air from the overly polished masterpiece of the same genre (Avatar came to mind) and other equally low-budget flicks but without the (arguably) impressive CGI special effects (remember Cloverfield?). The relentless march towards the end of the movie had me at the edge of my seat the entire time.
The end, however, was anticlimatic. Not that I thought it will end well (the group of us – 14 that night – was prepared for an ultra bad movie) but the cheek of the producers to think that we will return for a sequel was too much to bear.
A good bad movie, but there are just too many good good movie around.