Skyline

Do Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith save the day in a stolen alien hot rod, driving across 250,000 miles of space in just under two minutes and detonating a nuclear bomb in the belly of the mother ship just after setting loose a computer virus that freakishly works on both Apple and alien operating systems?

Apologies if anyone has 'Independence Day' on their Netflix que and was waiting to see it for the very first time.

Here we have the teaser for 'Skyline' which roped me in upon a first viewing based simply on style and tone, but upon a second viewing, came with the full realization that not only had I seen virtually everything in it before, but really not all that long ago.

But just so that I don't have to start with the bad stuff, 'Skyline' does make good use of a fairly recent news piece where Stephen Hawking was quoted as saying that mankind should avoid trying to contact extra-terrestrial life, as it could have disastrous consequences for the planet and her population. Insert twenty-year-old joke here about how we thought lawyers were bad!

The trailer does hold a masterful tone, keeping itself limited to real news broadcasts and Spielbergian creepy images, mostly consisting of, "what are we looking at?" kinda stuff. This blend lends it a sense of reality that quickly makes the dangers even more dangerous.

Music is kept from being overwhelming and the trailer's tight run-time keeps the tension high right up until the final image hits.

Now for the rest.

I can't help but feel like this is simply a mish-mash of everything we have seen before. Now I know, I know... the argument is that we have no original stories anymore. Probably true. But can we at least do some fresh visuals?

The falling blue special effects look suspiciously like the alien creatures being delivered to their underground vessels in Spielberg's 2005 "War of the Worlds." The glowing spheres concealing the alien vessel within is directly from the remake of "The Day the Earth Stood Still." The huge alien vessels laying waste to humanity from above are obviously taken from "Independence Day" And those with really keen ears will notice a suspiciously Transformers-ian sound effect at the :53-second mark.

Now check out this trailer for Michael Bay's "Transformers" and skip ahead to :38 seconds in.



This says two things to me: 1) that the makers of 'Skyline' aren't only ripping off visuals from other alien-invasion flicks, they're stealing sounds, too and 2) that I should probably seek help for my condition and take up knitting or something.

Now I come to the final question with which I will wrestle for several hours before bed -- the last shot of this teaser is of Mega-Maid sucking up humans by the thousands. There's lots of screaming and crying and from the extreme wide-angle look we get of the event, it seems fairly unpleasant. This leads to the general assumption that these aliens are here to harm us. Big surprise, get in line, everyone out there hates Earth.

The question in this is whether the trailer would have been better-suited holding onto its mystery element and letting audiences wonder if these creatures really are here to hurt us? The opening of the trailer sets a nice, ominous tone with Stephen Hawking's warnings about alien life mixing with ours, but the fact remains that this is still a suggestion. A guess.

Would a more clever ending have been for us to simply not know what their intentions are? Make you get to the theater to find out? Maybe if JJ Abrams was directing, but with the Brothers Strause...?

Of course not, and here is where I simultaneously contradict myself and give in to my 12-year-old boy yearnings... that last shot (the money shot) is going to get me into the theater. The spectacle of human carnage that is impossibly ridiculous is way too appealing to let slide and I will tee-hee in the car the whole way there.

For originality, the trailer (and the movie) gets huge marks off, but if I can manage Roland Emmerich disaster movies over and over again, this one deserves a shot. And based on the scale of Mega-Maid sucking all those little people up? It deserves a shot on the big screen.

"In Theaters."

Picture opens November 12.

Until next time!

(*Worth noting, the Brothers Strause (directors) last major release was Alien vs. Predator - Reqiuem. And if that doesn't fill you with confidence, the pic is exec produced by Brett Ratner. Just saying.)