Skylines Review: a Conventional Twist on Wild Science Fiction Action

There’s one obvious rule for sequels to action: get bigger. That was easy enough for the team behind 2017 Beyond the skyline, the exaggerated sequel to the 2010 film Worldwide Alien Invasion on a Budget horizon. The first film in the series plays so much of the story in a single high-rise apartment where some fearful survivors band together to escape the aliens that it comes as a shock when directors Greg and Colin Strause finally reveal they do have done bigger ambitions than a bottle movie. The sequel, produced by the Strauses with Liam O’Donnell as director, took the story halfway around the world and turned it into one happy trashy martial arts pulp saga.

The show’s biggest hallmark has always been its outrage: the first film introduces grotesque alien technology that rips the human brain out of their bodies, brainwashes them, and uses it to wield giant, heavily armored drone warriors called pilots. The sequel shows a child infected with alien DNA and growing up into a child with power over the aliens – just in time to help survivors fight off newer and more noticeable threats. Every development along the way in the first two films was imaginative, unexpected, and cheerfully exaggeratedly violent. So it feels strange that the series Capper, Skylinesis so conventional in both its story beats and action. The first two films are packed with “I can’t believe this just happened!” Moments. The third instead concatenates a series of “Oh yes, I’ve seen this before” scenes.

Beyond the skyline ends with a rousing cliffhanger as the alien infected child Rose (Lindsey Morgan), who has grown up, leads an armada of stolen and misused alien ships against the invading mother ship. It’s the perfect setup for a big action scene, setting the stage for whatever comes next. But returning director O’Donnell just quickly rewinds past that action and briefly recaps how it went: Rose froze in a bad moment and eventually had to destroy one of her own ships and kill her own people to win the fight. Five years later, she hides near London in a survival camp where rescued pilots live peacefully enough among the people.

That alone is a seed for the story that could bring a thousand novels out: It is fascinating that literally billions of former humans, now crammed into horrific, monstrous alien bodies, have reintegrated into society and no one is keeping an eye on them seems to throw. What a little one Skylines Shows from the post-apocalyptic human world resemble a cleaner, less crowded version of District 9where half the population has turned into clicky, chitinous, bug-like humanoids, and that’s just an accepted fact of life. O’Donnell’s script does not inhale to think about it, however. Rose has just enough time to see her local doctor, Dr. Meet Mal (Rhona Mitra) and learn that the pilots are suffering from a mysterious disease that can reconfirm their alien programming and turn them back into indiscriminate machines for killing people. Then Rose is picked up and dragged away by a vaguely sketched military organization that wants their help in their next big foray against the aliens.

As General Radford (Deep Space NineAlexander Siddig) explains the inevitable McGuffin he’s looking for is the core engine of the alien mothership that warped elsewhere when Rose destroyed the ship. His employee hacker Zhi (Cha-Lee Yoon) has broken into the alien warp network and can immediately transfer a ship to the source planet. So Radford wants to send a crack team of commands there, presumably to the aliens’ home base. He’s hoping to both regain nuclear propulsion – which will supposedly help propel Earth’s three billion pilots and keep them from going critically insane – and meet the aliens on their home turf.

His strike team: Bulletheaded Grunt Corporal Leon (Jonathan Howard, as clear Corporal Hicks analog), tough ranger Alexi (Ieva Andrejevaite, plays something in between Vasquez and the matrix counter) and sniper / SEAL Colonel Owens (Daniel Bernhardt). And to top it off, Rose’s brother Trent, one of the first free pilots, is in the mix to deliver the best wisecracks in the film and handle most of the claw-to-claw fights.

At the beginning of the story, when Radford is laying out the plan, Alexi tells Rose, “This is not a war. This is a hold-up. “This is a great idea that never pays off. Part of the fun of the horizon Series were the way in which they switch abruptly and unpredictably between genres, from horror to science fiction, run-and-gun action to emotional family drama. If Skylines It was actually a robbery film with clever planning and a Crackerjack crew of specialists trying to get an alien artifact out of an alien world. At least that would be something genre fans have never seen before. (independence Day

Except for the much derided upload of the stealth virus.) Instead, the team gets out of their ship and goes straight inside Aliens. The costumes, the personalities, the logs, the cloudy surroundings full of heavily armored, vicious animals, the endlessly damp and sticky surfaces, the specific action beats, even the climax in a hangar bay that eventually escapes into space – they all feel too familiar.

And where Skylines is not a monkey AliensIt repeats material from the wilder and more inventive early installments. The steadfast martial artist Yayan Ruhian briefly reiterates his role as a Lao militia leader ready to defeat aliens with spin kicks and sore throats. Like the first two films Skylines There are many pilots who strive to assert their human sides again, as their many eyes blink between “normally helpful human brain” red and “indiscriminate murder monster” blue. There is knife and rifle fights, as well as hand-to-hand combat, though the only fight that really stands out is an angry hand-to-hand combat between people with conflicting agendas. But almost every part of the story is literal, with twists and turns that savvy viewers will see before Act One is over, and tropes that have already played out in a dozen larger, more iconic films.

O’Donnell works on giving Skylines some human warmth as Rose struggles with her powers and reluctant Messiah Syndrome and the trauma of having failed so many survivors while trying to save even more. A somber conversation between her and Leon, who blames her for his sister’s death in the mothership fight, adds a pathos to the series that feels a little strange considering how much of his earlier desperate human connection on the run and in the middle happened panting fight. But the conversation feels like ticking a box. In retrospect, it seems like a huge mistake to skip this opening fight scene – the root of Rose’s trauma and guilt and the beginning of the doubts she grapples with in this film – and not just because it was a missed opportunity for the signature Series is special effects chaos. Most of her characterization comes from something more told than felt, and it leaves her a little hollow as a character.

Skylines feels like the respectable replay of a trusted friend who used to be a rowdy teenager, then a ruthless and wild twenty year old. It’s perfectly passable, low-key sci-fi that is almost certainly destined for a quick trip to Netflix, where it can be viewed as an amiable evening. There’s nothing outrageously bad or sloppy about it, and for the action fans it targets – the special kind of cinephiles who will be delighted when action veteran James Cosmo shows up as the film’s brilliant one-eyed opening narrator – it should be fun enough. But there are no surprises. There’s neither the glorious shock of the show’s original mind-boggling effects, nor the exultant energy of the second movie’s martial arts duels. It’s a perfectly okay science fiction film. It’s just that this series promised so much more.

horizon is on HBO max, Beyond the skyline is on Netflixand both films are far available to the Streaming Rental. Skylines is for rent from now on Amazon, Vuduand other streaming services.