Several months ago I saw a trailer for the movie Skyline. At first I was generally excited about what I saw. We had this mysterious light which descended upon L.A. en masse and through some magical property swept everyone in the city up, up, and away into what I can only assume is a giant buffet where some far more intelligent beings feast on us. Beyond that, I knew very little about the film. I assumed it was going to be another great sci-fi thriller where humanity bands together and uses our greatest technology against a foe far superior to ourselves, only to learn that it is our basic tools that ultimately cause the visitors downfall.
This is not what I got at all. SPOILER ALERT-but lets face it, if you haven’t seen the movie yet, you probably aren’t going to anyway.
What I got was the story of a boy and girl who visit their friend, who somehow made it out of their poverty-stricken hometown to become what appears to be Jay-Z. They enjoy all the comforts experienced by those who spring board their way into stardom only to find out that they are pregnant. The magical light that descends multiple times into the city somehow gives our hero magical powers while it gives the rest of the world suicidal tendencies, and in their attempts to escape our visitors he exhibits herculean strength and defeats them physically as well as mentally.
The story ends with them getting sucked up into the mothership (which by the way, was blown into tiny bits by an atomic weapon only to be magically reformulated in the air as if nothing had happened). Suddenly our hero has his head dissolved by the aliens and they feast on his brain. For whatever reason the aliens can’t eat his brain and it instead takes over the body of one of them. He then goes on a rampage in an effort to find his true love.
Why this movie depressed me. First of all, I don’t get what the title Skyline has to do with anything. Skyline suggest something on the horizon, not 20 feet away at the neighbors house. Second of all, we have no idea why our planet has been invaded. Do we have resources they need? Are they transients? Is this some religious cult, like Halo, and our planet is the resting place of some much needed artifact? NO. none of that. We are given no idea why they’ve come. To make matters worse we don’t even put up a fight. Our greatest weapons do NOTHING to them. The problem with an enemy that is so omnipotent is that we need a reason why they’ve descended from wherever and even bother with us. This becomes even more frustrating when we notice that the aliens aren’t after any resource other than our brains. This means that our brains are such a commodity and so valuable and so much better then theirs that they simply must have it now. If our brains are so great, why weren’t we able to master space travel? Why couldn’t we come up something to fight back. If the aliens are simply here to absorb humanities collective, then I have a youtube account they can use, and trust me, once they take a look at youtube they will realize just how little they will glean from absorbing our minds. It would be better for them to just continue their little trip around the galaxy and find someone who has accomplished something a little more substantive than videos singing the praises of Friday, or children being bitten on their finger, or cats.
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