Sunday 24 April 2011

Skyline

Skyline stars emerge from preview screening
Last night, along with friends, I got to watch Skyline. Has there ever been a more pointless, narrative starved film ever produced? Special effects? Gratuitous. Billed as Sci-Fi, this was a horror offering, in every sense of that word.

Wikipedia presents a tidy summary of the reviews. While a few actually liked it, they were in the minority.

The film has been met with largely negative reviews. Review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film a score of 15% based on 67 reviews, with an average score of 3.5/10. Writing in Variety, Joe Leydon panned the film: "Imagine a Kmart mash-up of Transformers and Independence Day and you're appropriately primed for Skyline, an underwhelming and derivative sci-fi thriller that's only marginally more impressive than a run-of-the-mill SyFy Channel telepic." Michael Philips of the Chicago Tribune wrote that the "effects are pretty good, on a fairly limited budget. And that's about all you can say for Skyline." Screen Rant's Ben Kendrick wrote that the film "comes across as a big-screen B-movie with a convoluted plot and too limited of a scope to make the audience feel the worldwide alien-apocalypse that’s supposedly unfolding in the film". In the New York Times, Mike Hale concluded, "it turns out that all the running and hiding and chopping (there’s an axe) was beside the point, which is the sort of thing that can make you angry if you care about the characters, but in this case is kind of a relief."
The comments last night were a tad less elevated in tone. Avoid at all costs!

1 comment:

  1. And we shall all watch it on the Syfy Channel when it hits the boob tube some Sunday afternoon when we have really and I mean really nothing better to do.

    I'm pretty sure that it is on the same plane as "Battlefield Earth", which, as bad as it is, does have unintended bright spots for us "rat brains" (and quite makes Scientology less appealing, if that's even possible). Sunday afternoon Syfy is just perfectly awful, and this should be fun. Someone else turns into the "2001" superbaby yet again as a thinly not-even-thinly-disguised ripoff of a collection of non plots. Or we could do what we always do and have it playing in the background while posting on the Internet.

    Just how much is popcorn in Kiwiland these days (I mean the good stuff you pop at home)?

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