Five New ‘Skyline’ Clips

Cinemimi[Wednesday December 28,2010]
Five new clips have been released from this month’s sci-fi release, ‘Skyline’, which boasts some visually-impressive FX but otherwise looks like a generic alien invasion pic.


In this month’s new release, Skyline, extraterrestrial creatures will attempt to do what about every 8 out of 10 aliens in Hollywood productions try to accomplish -- the invasion and conquest of the planet Earth and its inhabitants.

Five new clips from Skyline are now online and offer an early look at the latest onscreen battle between beings from another planet and the human race -- or, rather, those who live in Los Angeles.



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The second Skyline trailer and recent TV spots play up the film’s visual FX, which look quite dazzling and better than that of many alien invasion films. Brothers Colin and Greg Strause directed Skyline and have worked as FX designers/supervisors on seemingly every other big-budget production to be released over the past decade or so -- clearly they know how to handle the technical challenges of creating realistic but imaginative other-worldly monsters and machinery.

These siblings were only at helm for one other feature film prior to Skyline and that was… Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. That sci-fi spinoff was not exactly well-received by moviegoers, so the Strause brothers have not yet proven themselves capable of crafting a movie with a well-structured plot or more than one-dimensional characters. Could that change with their new project?

Check out the clips from Skyline below and get a feel for what the alien invasion pic has in store for us:

The plot for any flick that revolves around humans having a close encounter of the unfriendly kind tends to be the same (i.e., people attempt to hide from/defeat the aliens). What differentiates one of these genre movies from another is tone -- which can vary from mildly campy (Independence Day) to dead serious (Steven Spielberg’s War of the Worlds) -- and character development (does that even exist in invasion films?).

While the acting in Skyline so far looks to be pretty hokey, that tends to come with the territory. The movie seems to be quite serious and dramatic in terms of atmosphere, but whether it will take the time to actually give moviegoers a reason to care about the characters struggling to stay alive is the big issue.

We’ll have to wait and see if the film delivers on that front, but the outlook is not very good for the time being.