The Strause’ Brothers new film Skyline is out in theaters today, but I was already pretty trepidacious, seeing as how Rogue Pictures wasn’t screening it for critics. I was hoping the film would be so-bad-it’s-good, but unfortunately, it fell into the so-bad-it’s-mind-numbingly-boring category. While I didn’t enjoy it very much, I was impressed by about 10 minutes worth of the visual effects in the 90-minute film. And if the budget really is around $1 million, then it really is an achievement on the scale of District 9, just without the thrills, inventiveness, script, or great acting in that film.
I think Devin Faraci’s review is pretty spot on:
Skyline is impressive if unimaginative, and there are lots and lots of bright daylight scenes of giant monsters and fighter planes and alien space craft and weird alien squid beasts. They look great, and I would totally hire Hydraulx to do my FX work if I had FX worked that needed doing.
But the rest of it. Oh, the rest of it! It’s terrible. Actually, many of the FX scenes are terrible as well – the FX looks great, but everything happening on screen around the FX is bone headed or moronic or poorly shot. And that’s pretty much the film in a nutshell: bone headed, moronic and poorly shot. And terribly acted as well, just for good measure. There’s not a single believable moment in Skyline, and I don’t mean that I couldn’t believe in an alien invasion. I mean that not one human being in the film comes across like a human being of any sort, that none of the dialog rings true or is delivered well and that some of the actors can’t even exit an airplane convincingly.