Prepare to be Reviewed

Another Brutally Honest Flick Review By The Jaeger.

SKYLINE

Directed by The Brothers Strause

“I hate L.A.”

Yes, yes, yes, so do I, so does everybody, in fact nearly everyone I know hates L.A. even people who live there. So if you thought seeing it destroyed would give great satisfaction, you would be wrong.

A simple birthday weekend for a rich yuppie and his friends goes horribly wrong as sunrise comes two hours early in the form of a fleet of alien invaders using pretty blue lights to entice humankind to their doom! As the alien ships descend on Los Angeles, sucking people into their ships as they go, the rich yuppies must use all the survival instincts they have to elude the aliens and survive the apocalypse.

What happens when a couple of visual effects artists who are completely clueless about tone, pacing, dialog, and story decide to make a low budget sci-fi flick? Well you get Skyline of course! A flick where the characters are so flat, so one dimensional, so utterly boring and without personality that seconds in to the flick I found myself desperately yearning for their demise. It’s a shame really because the visual effects, and the alien design elements are really quite striking, but as I have said MANY times before, visual effects do not a great picture make.

Thank dog it only stole 92 minutes of my time. I suppose I should have listened to those alarm bells that went off in my head when the quote on the back of the blu-ray case read: “From the visual effects masterminds behind Avatar, Iron Man 2, and 300!” Lucky for me I borrowed this flick from a friend, as I would never be able to forgive myself if I bought it sight unseen.

The Alliance blu-ray presentation of Skyline is a fairly decent 1080p MPEG 4 AVC encode with strong colours, and skin-tones, but black levels don’t fare as well however coming through rather soft and muted most times. The audio is an ass kicking 5.1 DTS HD MA presentation that will quite possibly blow your roof off if turned up too loud, it’s not perfect, but it gets the job done.

Extra features include a director’s commentary, deleted and extended scenes, pre-visualisations with optional commentary, and two trailers with optional commentaries.

For all the positives of the visual effects, and the decent High Def video and audio presentation, Skyline still warrants nothing more than a 1 out of 5. Rent at own risk, you have been warned.