Review Rating: 6 Tentacles

Focusing on a group of friends stranded in Los Angeles, Skyline tells a story of strange descending lights that turn out to be an invading alien force.

I don’t get it. Skyline was being lauded as last year’s Independence Day, and after seeing it, I seriously have to scoff, oh yeah where? The actors for the movie are just fine, but we start off with the typical white-guy-black-guy friendship that’s lasted from high school days for pete’s sake. Eric Balfour of 24 and The Spirit, stars as Jarrod, main character and bff of Donald Faison’s (Scrubs) character Terry. They decide to have a long-awaited get-together in L.A. and bring their girlfriends, to hole up in Terry’s fancy high rise apartment and get a mighty big surprise when the lights come out.

The aliens look interesting. That’s about the nicest thing I can say for the movie, because really, they don’t give you anything else. The aliens never attempt to communicate in any way we can understand, there’s no big government conspiracy, I mean coverup, I mean involvement, nothing. Even the huge explosion that happens when the ostensibly government-controlled planes come in and shoot down one of the alien ships, it’s not that spectacular because of what the alien ship does in response. The entire movie seems to be creeping just along the edge of anything that’s been done in a movie before, and only really does anything note-worthy if not unique at all in the very last ten minutes of the movie. And the abrupt ending, obvious plotting for a sequel, just pisses me off. It was nice to have Dexter’s David Zayas in the movie as the helpful apartment neighbor, but his character was destined to bite it and that made me sad.

Skyline gets a sad rating of 6 Tentacles. I know the aliens had more than that, but like the plot, they just kind of dangled there and did nothing for me. I think a movie that got a full-building advertisement at last year’s Comic-con should’ve done better.