Beyond Skyline
Genre: action scifi
Release Year: 2017
About
Beyond Skyline is the unexpected follow-up to the 2010 alien invasion movie Skyline. This movie takes place during the same time as the original then continues the story from Los Angeles to rural Laos in Southern Asia. Instead of being an alien invasion movie, Beyond Skyline changes the genre up a bit. This time around the movie is more action / science fiction with some martial arts elements involved.
In Beyond Skyline we follow a gruff LA detective named Mark Corley (played by Frank Grillo) who, along with his rebellious teen son Trent (played by Jonny Westen) and some other random people get abducted by aliens and have to fight their way out. The get abducted in LA and end up flying overseas to Southern Asia where they team up with some kind of drug cartel fighting the aliens.
See 1 2 3
The visual effects in Beyond Skyline are pretty bad. They are so bad in fact, that they make it hard to tell that the rubber suits used for some of the aliens are actually practical effects or cg. I don't know if they put some cg over top of the rubber suits or what, but it looks really terrible. I didn't even know they were supposed to be practical effect until the credits of the movie where you see some bloopers of actors in the alien suits tripping and falling on set.
The only scenes that have special effects that don't look like a video game are ones reused from the original Skyline. But even these scenes end up ruined by mixing them into the bad cg used for this movie. There is a particularly bad scene right at the end of the movie where the camera rotates around a human with their hand on an alien and it's very obvious that they have their hand on nothing. But then immediately after that they show that exact same alien being played by a man in a suit. WHY NOT JUST USE THAT ALIEN INSTEAD OF THE CG ONE?!
This movie has awful cg mixed with practical effects that are for some reason made to look worse with cg on top. For this I have to give this a 1/3. It just takes you out of the experience, especially when at the very end you see the sets and alien suits in the bloopers and they look better than in the damn movie.
Hear 1 2 3
There is nothing special about the audio in this movie. It's not poorly done, nor is it overly exciting or engaging. It's just good enough to get the job done. I really don't have much to say about other than I wasn't offended by it in any way. So i'll be giving it a 2/3 due to it not having any glaring issues.
Feel 1 2 3
The story of this movie and the motivations of the characters are just dumb. For some reason they try to shoehorn in the characters from the first movie, but they use different actors and re-filmed a few scenes from the original movie so that you know who they are supposed to be. Those two characters continue from the end credits of Skyline where the protagonist Jarrod's brain is in an alien body and he is fighting his way out of the ship. His girlfriend is pregnant and Frank Grillo's character has to help deliver the baby and then take it with him on his journey. The baby also grows super fast because it's a magic alien baby or something.
They get to Asia and meet up with a drug cartel. Which happens to have awesome martial arts masters. Oh, and also none of the aliens use guns because then they couldn't fight the aliens with their martial arts moves. Also the girl's blood has the cure to the alien powers or something. The weirdest thing to me was that you see from the alien overlord's point of view a few times and it just feels so disjointed. I have no idea why we are seeing from it's point of view, and all we see is just blue and red colors swirling around.
This movie has a dumb story, uninteresting characters and martial arts just to have them. I'm sure you can see why I give it a 1/3.
Conclusion
Beyond Skyline is an awful followup to Skyline. It really just feels like someone who likes martial arts bought the rights to Skyline and decided they wanted to cast their favorite actors and make them fight the aliens in hand to hand combat. It's the first time i've ever seen an alien invasion movie with martial arts elements and I think I know why I've never seen one like that before.
It's really too bad because Skyline was actually a pretty interesting take on an alien invasion movie and stands on it's own really well. It never needed this sequel and I kinda wish I had never seen it. Also they show bloopers during the credits, and this movie is not a comedy in any way. So that should tell you something.