Will It Suck?

By josh

Here’s a plot for a movie: aliens come to earth, and after learning that they don’t come in peace, we humans have to ban together to stop them. Okay, now I’ll give you ten seconds to name all the movies you can that centers around this premise – go!…….. Alright, how many did you come up with? Really, that many?! Great, now add Skyline to that list, the new movie about alien ships attacking every major city in the world, and our next game will ask you to name each and every movie Samuel L. Jackson has been in. But first, let’s check out the Skyline trailer…

The clip starts off simply enough – it’s four A.M. in L.A. and everyone is sleeping (already a plot hole, but we’ll let that one slide). Suddenly out of the sky, beams of light start slowly dropping to earth from above, and it becomes clear the next day that this isn’t just an extra terrestrial fact finding mission. The alien ships start sucking people up, and it’s revealed that if you look at the alien ships, that’s how they get you. An all-out fight for earth and the human race begins, but it might just be up to our everyday heroes to figure out how to fend off the latest threat from above.

Holy space invaders! If this trailer didn’t remind me so much of Independence Day, I’d say it was a War of the Worlds rip-off. The clip comes complete with alien motherships hovering over every major world city, even descending out of thick black clouds, all courtesy of the 1996 Roland Emmerich hit. And the scene where thousands of people are being sucked up into the bowels of the ship was really cool, and pretty freaky, but we can’t honestly say we didn’t think of a similar scene in Steven Spielberg’s 2005 ‘War’ remake. And let’s not even mention they stole that ‘last line of defense’ from Spielberg’s Raiders of the Lost Ark, in the “just don’t look and it won’t get you” department.

However, even a movie that so clearly bites from previous blockbusters can be good in the shadow of such behemoths, but that normally comes from the charisma of the actors involved, and from what I’m seeing, I’m having trouble naming anyone involved in this. If I weren’t such a fan of Scrubs, I’d pass off Donald Faison as that guy from Clueless, and the rest of the cast looks like a cattle call for young, attractive Hollywood actors, including an Adrian Brody lookalike. Not quite the cast needed to carry an unoriginal popcorn flick.

So, will it suck?

Yes. Whenever we get these copy cat movies, they normally go straight to video, or hit the small screen as the Syfy movie of the week. And if this had come out within a year or two of either the two films it steals most from, I could chock it up to dumb luck and bad timing, but it’s been years since either movie was in theaters, and with all the talk of an Independence Day sequel, I find it hard to believe that a movie like this got greenlit. However, it’s the casting choices that’ll bury this film. Don’t get me wrong, I love Faison, and am very interested to see him cast in major movie roles, but he is no Will Smith (ID4), and certainly no Tom Cruise (WOTW), and judging from the trailer, we’re not even sure if he’s going to make it to the end of the movie. There is the outside chance that this could be a sleeper hit, like last year’s District 9, but that movie was incredibly original, and survived on its interesting concept. Unfortunately, this concept has been trudged around once or twice before, so audiences might just take the film’s advice and just not look.

Tags: Adrian Brody, District 9, Donald Faison, Independence Day, Roland Emmerich, Samuel L. Jackson, Skyline, Steven Spielberg, Tom Cruise, War of the Worlds, Will Smith