You've got to hand it to The Brother Strause. They make darned pretty movie trailers. Great special effects, glossy photography, action, hip young actors and style aplenty. If The Brothers Strause made fake film trailers...in the Grindhouse tradition of Rodriguez and Tarantino...you'd want to see every single movie. But, unfortunately for us all The Brothers Strause make full length feature films. Their first, the abysmal Aliens Vs Predator Requiem contains all the positive attributes listed above...and yet it's a complete steaming pile of alien poo doo. Their follow up Skyline has a similarly impressive trailer...as well as a full length movie that's similarly unimpressive.
Skyline is basically Cloverfield meets Independence Day. Since the group of unlikable young actors never leave their apartment block, it keeps the budget nice and low. But The Brothers Strause keep the intelligence level low too with dumb, obnoxious characters doing dumb things allowing the dumb alien invaders to dumbly pick them off one by one. It's like a full length movie was stretched out of a 20 minute Twilight Zone episode, with the plot climaxing at a point that feels both silly, incomplete and unsatisfying.
So, as with AvP-R, you have a group of wholly unlikable characters being chased around by glossy special effects...all the while the audience doesn't care one little bit. Stick to making trailers boys. Please.
1 comment:
This wasn't as awful as I'd heard it was.
Don't get me wrong, it ain't especially good. But it's reasonably short, lots of stuff happens and the FX are pretty cool. Shame the script is terrible and highly derivative - oh look here's a bit nicked from War of the Worlds...and another from Independence Day...and another from Starship Troopers.
Still, it could have been worse. It could have been AVP:R. And at least it wasn't the coma inducing bordom of the massively overrated Monsters.
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