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"I'm just really trying to focus on my photography right now."
I've got to start with a small confession: I like the live-action Transformers movie. A lot.
I had the arguable good fortune of never having seen the original cartoon series beforehand, but more likely because I have the seemingly rare ability to look at a re-imagining or "modernization" of a known franchise and say, "I see what you did there, and weather or not I agree with the decisions, I can appreciate the reasons you made these changes."
Now that you know this, understand what I mean when I say that after watching Skyline, I now fully understand and appreciate the primary complaint about the 2008 Transformers movie: too much focus on the puny humans. We came here to see some friggin' aliens.
Everything about Skyline says it was supposed to be a "Found Footage" movie in the vein of Paranormal Activity or Cloverfield. This sort of method works wonders in this sort of supernatural and science fiction story because on top of seeing the giant monster wreak havoc on the city you are treated to a first-person experience during the siege and terror - you are one of the characters. It gives us a reason to not know or understand the "why" in the situation we've found ourselves in, because there's no time to figure out why whatever is happening is happening, we have to run again.
Skyline ignores this obvious fact and instead makes us sit through an alien attack as what must be through the eyes of a fly on the wall, or a family pet along for the ride. No, wait ... they make us sit through a collection of rich people and stereotypes sitting around, looking out the window every now and again during an alien attack is what they do. I am amazed at just how much of this movie is the cast sitting around talking about how they should do something but ultimately deciding it's too risky to do something so they shouldn't do something, unless that something is peeking out the window to see what's going on outside and talking about it more.
To be fair, this "sit and wait" approach is not without logical reasoning: the two times they tried to leave the condo, suddenly aliens sneak up and almost catch them, though instead they wind up catching the other survivors they've just encountered in the building. As realistic a conclusion this is, all it does it make it so very, very boring.
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"Better get used to the set, kids. We'll be here a while."
Let's talk plot: a group of rich people and two relatively middle-class people who are friends with some of the rich people gather in L.A. to celebrate Dr. Turk's birthday. Overnight mysterious blue lights touch down all over the city (and apparently the world) and mesmerize puny humans into walking towards the light and vanish. The alien abduction method appears fairly absolute based on the small amount of closeups of the actual in-the-distance action we're afforded from the hidey-hole amongst the forced sub-plots that have no merit on the story, and around the half-way mark we're given a glimpse of the alien invincibility which turns a story of survival into a hopeless and pointless countdown to the inevitable conclusion of gotta catch 'em all.
And what really eats at me is the seconds of what appears to be a promise of a sequel (or at least a comic series) at the end. That right there could have been the last half of the movie. After an infuriatingly boring ninety minutes we finally see what could be real promise, through a couple still images cut into the credits. Was this supposed to be a feature-length pilot for a series that was accidentally released into theaters or was this always the plan? Honestly, the whole thing could have been a companion prequel comic book used to drum up excitement for the real movie we were promised.
If you enjoyed this review, feel encouraged to visit Not The Demographic [http://notthedemographic.blogspot.com] and make yourself at home. But I call dibs on the nice chair.