Skyline: Another one where you root for the aliens to win

After a night of partying in Los Angeles Jerrod and his pregnant girlfriend Elaine are awakened by mysterious blue lights. Soon they discover that they are among the few people to have survived an alien invasion and must fight to escape the alien invaders.

No one will ever fault The Strause Brothers (who directed the film) for their abilities to create dazzling visual effects. The Brothers created the visual effects for films such as 300 and Battle: Los Angeles, so it should come as no surprise that the big battle sequences and those sequences which featured the aliens were among the most captivating and entertaining parts of Skyline. But therein lies the problem because all of those special effects could not mask the insipid story and vapid character within the story which were never developed enough to care about. It seemed like The Strause Brothers envisioned their movie as a sort of Cloverfield meets War of the Worlds mashup but in reality, it almost felt like an episode of The Real World L.A. as the survivors just sat around whining and moaning about everything (pre and post alien invasion). The two main characters the audience was supposed to connect with emotionally, Jerrod and Elaine, were so crippled by dreadful dialogue and a lack of depth that it not only made them hard to connect with, it also made them easy to forget. The story was never given proper direction or focus and tended to wonder aimlessly between those scenes of awesome looking visual effects.

Bad story plus bad dialogue plus cool visuals all added up to make Skyline a wasted opportunity of a sci-fi thriller.

Grade: D