![]() Both play survivors on opposite sides of the law, whom Mark encounters while trying to get the baby he delivered - who keeps mysteriously aging years over the course of days - to a doctor. Once the movie literally crashes in Laos, O'Donnell introduces another element that takes Beyond Skyline completely over the top: martial arts masters Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian (of Gareth Evans' Raid duology). Because there are men actually playing these monsters, each has personality, especially when an ally is discovered in one of the aliens, its origins allowing it to be sympathetic to the plight of these abducted flesh suits. Whether they're the towering monstrosities stomping through cities and jungles, or the smaller iterations that pilot these mechs from inside their cockpit skulls, these creatures are insanely convincing, getting into hand-to-hand skirmishes with our human survivors, their red and blue eyes glowing LED insectoid lights. The team at Hydraulx VFX work overtime to really bring these Lovecraftian nightmares from the sky to life, crafting mixes of practical man-in-suit performance and digital tomfoolery that are just as impressive as anything you've seen in the latest Marvel Cinematic Universe installment. Between this and Wheelman, Grillo's really finding his niche in these smaller cheap thrill showcases, flexing in more ways than one. When the aliens invade and suck the two up into their ship, Grillo switches over into full action movie mode, bringing his muscled physicality to scenes of scaling walls and evading the hulking, robotic beasts who pilot this biomechanical saucer. They're just two guys left alone in the world due to an unforseen tragedy, but Mark can't keep bailing the kid out every time he breaks another jabroni's jaw. His relationship with his violent, lawless son (Jonny Weston) feels real for the few scenes they share before the shit hits the fan. Grillo's got a really wonderful screen presence, and enough chops to discover nuance in what could've otherwise been a one note genre movie "hero" role. It's a real "Corman School" approach that gifts the production a level of value well beyond its means, making wise, aesthetically-pleasing decisions like setting the humans' final stand against this invading, grey matter sucking horde on the steps of Yogyakarta's Prambanan Temples.Ĭasting Frank Grillo as Mark - the LAPD cop who's been taking time off to hit the bottle following the death of his wife - was another wise decision. Embracing its genre movie roots while milking each dollar of Beyond Skyline's $20 million budget (upping the ante in every imaginable way), it makes 'Nam-subtext text while cinematographer Christopher Probst ( Mindhunter) stops to admire the fact that he's shooting a good chunk of this movie in Indonesia (standing in for Laos). Only freshman feature director Liam O'Donnell's sequel doesn't look like a B-Movie at all. Sure, there's some janky CGI blood squibs, and the interiors of the alien craft show the production's seams every once in a while, but O'Donnell's follow up to the '10 Strause Brothers Independence Day knock off (which came fifteen years too late and forgot to be any good) takes the James Cameron route. This is no joke B-Movie spectacle, beamed straight into your living room without a dose of irony, and we're here for it. ![]() In case you needed me to hard sell you beyond that - which, if you do, I'm honestly not sure why you're even reading this website in the first place - Beyond Skyline includes a fucking kaiju battle in its climactic reel. It literalizes the original notion behind Star Wars ( which was conceived as a protest picture), and then transmutes that audacious idea into a relentless DTV action romp, never letting up for the total 105-minute runtime. Then its American protagonists literally crash land in Laos and look to rebels, still living in huts and tunnels equipped with traps left over from the Vietnam War, to save them from this new marauding technological force. ![]() Beyond Skyline is the type of motion picture that nukes a few blocks of Los Angeles, features Starship Trooper-esque vagina aliens who eat people's brains, and has Frank Grillo deliver a woman's baby aboard a spaceship, all in the first half hour or so.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |