Since Cinemascore began operation in 1979 only 14 films, give or take, have received the (second) lowest score. In this series I’ll be reviewing some of those films. This week, stay away from the windows, don’t open your eyes, and for God’s sake, hold on to your brains.

So What is it?

Greg and Colin Strause, credited here under the unfortunate moniker “The Brothers Strause”, began their careers working in VFX in the early days of CGI before expanding into directing music videos (where they worked with such luminaries as Lincoln Park and Nickelback), advertising (Penzoil, Ford, Fresca), and finally feature films (Aliens vs Predator: Requiem [C]).  This is to say, for directors of a scrappy little indie, their sensibilities are squarely commercial. Skyline is a movie that takes few chances. It has a marketable premise, follows a familiar reliable plot, takes place in a modest and contained setting, and features effets that are both impressive and for sale. In a lot of ways it feels more like the movie you make to prove you can handle large soulless franchise work rather than the movie you make after escaping large soulless franchise work.

The film opens gliding across a cityscape beset by spots of uncanny blue light. In an apartment, a young (post-college, pre-children) and scantily clad couple are woken up by the intense lights. The woman (Elaine) rushes to vomit, suggesting they may not be pre-children for long, and we see the aftermath of a drunken party complete with more semi-dressed and similarly-aged friends. The room shakes violently, and the man (Jerrod) is drawn to the strange humming light, hypnotized as burns spread across his skin and eyes. Finally a horror movie willing to jump right into the action without spending any time on the boring old cliched backstories that ultimately don’t affect the narrative in any meaningful way.

The title blinks on screen and we immediately flash back for all the boring old cliched backstories that ultimately don’t affect the narrative in any meaningful way. Jerry and Elaine are a young couple visiting their rich friend (Donald Faison aka Turk from Scrubs) for a party in LA. Turk is playing the sort of LL Cool J role of a cool, amoral, womanizing badass that his Scrubs performance poked fun at. He’s an awkward fit. Too much wide-eyed baby faced earnestness, not enough natural swagger. We also meet Turk’s girlfriend (Candise), mistress (Denise), building super (Oliver), and some other characters who get vaporized before I got a chance to catch their names or job titles. Turk wants Jerry to move out to LA, but Elaine doesn’t want to, and confesses to Jerry that she is pregnant, news that they both treat like a cancer diagnosis. After the party, everybody crashes at Turk’s apartment, and we’re back where we started, having learned nothing of importance.

Back in the present we see one of the cannon fodder friends get sucked out by the blue light. Jerry is also being hypnotized and lightly cooked, but Turk manages to wrestle him away from the window before he can be sucked away.  Jerry convulses for a bit while his expensive makeup effects fade off and then he and Turk head to the roof to figure out what’s going on. There they witness a fleet of alien spaceships descending on the city and vacuuming up hundreds of people. The spaceship designs are very 2010 – overly busy, semi-organic, semi-mechanical, gray metal with blue glowy bits. They’ve got a squid-like motif that’s kind of cool, but even that is pretty derivative.

One of the ships spots our heroes and they flee only to discover they’ve accidentally locked the door behind them. Turk tries to shoot off the lock, but only manages to shoot a couple holes in the door. This is a nice bit.  Little grace notes like this go a long way towards giving a movie a personality, and this is a movie that really could have used one.

Elaine opens the door from the other side, and gets blasted by the blue hypno light, but the guys grab her and all three make it back to the apartment where they theorize about what’s going on, although Turk says he’s “not looking to find out” as though he had just witnessed someone acting strange by the side of the road and not a full scale alien invasion of Los Angeles. This isn’t really a mind-your-own-business situation. The gang also deduces the function of the hypno lights and Elaine muses, “I mean who wouldn’t want to look at something so beautiful? It’s kind of brilliant actually.”  This concerning thought is ignored by the others.

While Elaine reflects wistfully about the lights, Jerry seems to be having some lingering physical side-effects, the other two women remain quietly pensive, and Turk goes to check on his elderly neighbor, where he is attacked by a smaller tentacled alien drone. Once again, the effects work is very impressive, and the design work is functional.

With the aliens sweeping the apartment, the gang decides to try and escape the city, splitting into two cars, with Turk and his mistress taking his Ferrari, and the other three following in a sedan. But as soon as the Ferrari exits the parking garage, it’s squished by a giant alien foot. I didn’t know there’d be giant alien feet in this movie! Turk is somehow entirely unharmed by this, but as he tries to run back towards the others, he’s caught by the alien’s giant sticky tongue and swallowed by its giant hand mouth. This is a pretty good monster scene and really impressive for the budget. The rest of the gang runs back into the parking garage where they catch another couple who were also enroute out of the city. The crowd doesn’t get far before one of the tentacly drones pops out and gobbles up the husband, and is then immediately run over by Oliver, the building super who we met earlier. The husband crawls out of the downed alien’s stomach, goopy but no worse for wear. Things are beginning to look up for humanity, but alas, the alien is not quite dead and one of its tentacles grabs the man by the head, picks him up, and sucks out his brain. We see the intact and surprisingly clean brain complete with a little dangling brain stem, and the alien spits out another intact brain and pops the new one in its mouth, before bouncing up completely rejuvenated. My interest in the movie is similarly rejuvenated.

The super leads the survivors outside and they make a run towards another apartment. We get a good look at the big walking aliens here, who have a very Cthulhu-esque design, tentacle beards and all. The wife, as yet unnamed, gets eaten, but the other four survivors make it across and hunker down in another, very familiar looking, apartment. The gang does quite a lot of hunkering down. But soon we are back on budget and the mighty US military arrives to engage in glorious combat with the invading monsters, by land and by air. There’s a pretty good dogfight that shows a real command of visual storytelling, that ends with a nuclear bomb going off a few blocks from our main characters, and not affecting them at all.

Jerry wants to make a run for one of the helicopters, but Oliver thinks they should let the army fight off the aliens and not get in the way. When the chips are down, some men rise to fight, some men cower in fear, and some men loot equipment from the men who rose to fight. Jerry knows who he is, and is not persuaded by pleas to patriotism or the common struggle of humanity. Oliver tries to physically restrain him, but Jerry suddenly exhibits super powers, complete with glowing eyes and transforming skin, and throws Oliver across the room before telling Elaine to “trust him.” Which she does.

Jerry and Elaine head to the roof to rendezvous with a chopper, grabbing a fire axe on the way – to fend off creatures that just survived a nuclear bomb – while Oliver and Candise stay behind to get eaten by an alien. Eating Candise causes the alien to explode, and I suddenly wish we had gotten to know what her deal was. On the roof, Jerry and Elaine are attacked by an alien, but the axe actually works, and they bring it down easily. Jerry kills another one with a cinderblock and fights one off by hand. Eat shit Oppenhiemer. However, victory is short lived. One of the larger ships closes in and abducts the lovers, who embrace for one last time, silhouetted in blue light as they are pulled weightlessly towards the heavens.

However, defeat is short lived. Elaine wakes up on the alien ship, covered in black goo, lying in a pile of unconscious bodies.  An alien claw machine is picking people up by their heads and sucking their brains out through big tubes. Jerry gets his brain sucked, but before Elaine gets hers, another tentacle scans her stomach and discovers she’s pregnant, sparing her temporarily. We watch a row of glowing blue brains go through a series of tubes and then get placed inside big humanoid aliens who suddenly come to life, and run off. A single brain, Jerry`s, is glowing red instead of blue and when it’s put inside a monster, the creature acts strangely, grabbing its head and seeming confused. Elaine is dropped to the ground and an alien cesarean machine moves towards her menacingly, but is intercepted and destroyed by the red-brained monster. Elaine is scared and almost as confused as the audience, but the monster brushes her face with its giant claw and she quietly says, “Jerrod?”

Roll credits!

So Why D Minus?

I’m really surprised by the reaction to this one. This movie is reviled. It’s one of the worst reviewed movies I’ve ever covered, both from professional critics (15% rotten tomatoes) and imbeciles (4.5 IMDb). And yet there’s nothing particularly objectionable about it. Sure, the tone is a bit on the miserabilist side, the characters are flat and fairly unpleasant, both the story and creature design are very derivative, the setting is pretty restricted, and the cinematography looks like ass. But those sort of flaws typically mean that a movie is, at worst, forgettable. It usually takes a certain degree of weirdness for a movie to invoke such strong responses (the raison d’etre for this entire column), and yet the little bit of weirdness seems to be the only aspect of the movie that was well received.

So Were they right?

This is a good movie!

Well, it’s not a bad movie. I’d be hard pressed to argue it deserves any better than a C+, but I’ll be damned if it’s any worse than a C-. It’s a perfectly competent, commercially minded programmer with a goofy ending that’s still spawning sequels. You could do worse.