Beyond Skyline (2017)

Tough-cop-guy (Frank Grillo) is with his petulant son (Jonny Weston), a Girl (Bojana Novakovic) and a standard Ederly-Black-street-person (Antonio Fargas) when the aliens attack LA. There’s also cameos from Latino-cop-about-to-die and Black-cop-about-to-die (but hey, she’s a woman this time). The aliens brainwash people and then steal them, along with blowing up random things. Time passes and Tough-cop-guy is on the alien spaceship and defending a baby. More time passes and Tough-cop-guy, Girl, and Baby are now in Indonesia with a bunch of martial artists who were apparently in The Raid. So naturally, they fight the aliens with martial arts. Then some more stuff happens, but unless it is punching or kicking, it really doesn’t matter.

I don’t remember Skyline. That isn’t a snide way of saying it is unmemorable. I can’t remember it at all. I know I watched it. I know I didn’t think much of it and grouped it with weak alien invasion movies like Battle LA (which I barely remember) and Battleship (which is kinda hazy as well). But plot and story—I’ve got nothing.

So this is the sequel. But it seems that very little from the first is needed for this one. An alien with a human brain and a pregnant woman are framed as if they are holdovers from the first film, but they don’t stick around long.

Beyond Skyline is an odd picture. I’ve seen enough low-budget alien invasion films to know how they run (thanks SyFy) and this one starts like they all do. But then things go haywire. I’m used to poor scripts, but I don’t think the script had anything to do with how they made this film. It seems what actors they could get for a few days and what locations they could wrangle define the picture. The film is in three parts and each part changes tone, pace, goal, and most of the characters. Big discoveries come out of nowhere because that’s not the focus.

“Hey, I just, for no reason thought that this young girl’s blood could save us all.”
“Cool, we’ll take that as a fact and I’ll toss in some tech there’s no way I could know anything about and we’ve got a plan.”

The big difference between Beyond Skyline and other similarly budgeted flicks is that they avoid special effects and fight choreography and use up time in endless, poor relationship discussions while Beyond Skyline doesn’t even pretend that the characters or relationships matter and dives into the FX and fights. There’s a whole lot of combat here. Large humanoid robots get in hand-to-hand fights while giant robots knock down buildings and stomp on folks. Martial artists fight each other for no reason and everybody shoots everybody all the time. The last third is the most fun, even though it doesn’t fit in with anything that came before. We have old-school martial arts, with a guy getting his arm cut off and that not slowing him down in his blade attack. It’s silly, but an enjoyable kind of silly.

This isn’t a good movie. Nothing means anything, the plot is “whatever happens” and the characters are just vague descriptions. But if you want to watch lots of pointless fighting, Beyond Skyline has you covered.