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!