Skylines movie review

MOVIE TITLE: Skylines

Premieres December 18, 2020

RATING: R

LENGTH: 1 hour, 53 minutes

Movie Review Mom GRADE: B

IN A NUTSHELL:

This sci-fi adventure has a lot of action and will sound a little bit familiar because planet earth is threatened by a virus. Well, that and a bunch of aliens. See, 2020 could have been way worse with aliens!

Combine Aliens with Starship Troopers and you get this movie.

The name of the movie might sound familiar because it’s the third installment of the Skyline movies, none of which I’ve seen. The first one was rated PG-13 but the subsequent ones are rated R. Fans of the franchise readily admit that this is a unique situation where the 3rd movie is actually better than the first two.

Liam O’Donnell directed this low-budget action flick during quarantine, so critics who are ripping the movie to shreds should try to do that themselves.

TIPS FOR PARENTS:

Profanity, especially spoken by one of the aliens. You have to read subtitles, which often have profanity and F-bombs. Sometimes characters are used to replace profanity like #$#!!@?!
Lots of fighting with weapons and hand-to-hand combat.
Lots of destruction.

A guy flips the bird.
High body count with bloody, gory deaths of humans and aliens.

THEMES:

Courage
Teamwork
Humanity
Tolerance
Hope
Family

THINGS I LIKED:

Lindsey Morgan is the heart of the movie and seems to give it her all.
I thought the special effects were actually really good, especially considering the limited budget.
Some of the alien designs are really creative and you get to see a lot of them up and close.
Rhona Mitra’s performance is quite fierce and I would have enjoyed it more but the Botox or plastic surgery mouth was super distracting. She’s so pretty that she doesn’t need those treatments.
It’s got a rockin soundtrack and an effective musical score.
I like Daniel Bernhardt. He has worked as a stunt man, model, voice-over actor, TV actor, and even directed.
Some humor, especially in the conversations between Rose and her alien sibling, Trent. Lots of cheeky dialogue.
Mention of the movie Big. A character says, “You’ve never seen Big? It’s a classic.” I totally agree. Add it to your watch list if you’ve never seen it!
Really good martial-arts fight scene with Cha-Lee Yoon.
It’s been a long time since I’ve seen funny outtakes at the end of a movie during the rolling credits, but this movie has them. Yay!

THINGS I DIDN’T LIKE:

There is a LOT of exposition, especially at the beginning, but it’s actually required so we can understand what’s going on, especially if you haven’t seen the previous movies in the story. Because the plot is complicated, more exposition is required throughout the film which bogs it down.
It’s hard to really like the heroine because of her cranky personality. The one character I liked the most was her alien sibling with the potty mouth, Trent.
Some overacting made me roll my eyes.
Soooo many of the scenes are visually dark, which will make viewing the movie on small devices difficult once it goes to streaming.
Act 1 is very slow but hang in there because it picks up speed.
The scenes seem to jump forward and back in a confusing sequence.
It’s just too long. Honestly, I got bored.
That giant blue Easter egg was a ridiculous prop. It literally looked like one of those big plastic eggs I bought at Wal-mart a few years ago. The actors didn’t carry it in such a way to make it look like it had any heft.
Sometimes the aliens really did look like people wearing big costumes.
If you love Frank Grillo, you’ll be disappointed that he’s not in this third installment in the franchise, only in a few flashbacks. If you want to see him, check out his newest movie coming out on Hulu called BOSS LEVEL. Click here to see my movie review of Boss Level.
It felt like the script could have used a lot more work.
Some of the characters looked alike so I had to pay attention to which one it was.