Went yesterday to see Skyline, in which that black guy from Scrubs and Claire’s Middle-Eastern-looking boyfriend, Gabriel, from Six Feet Under pick the wrong weekend to visit Los Angeles, because it’s being taken over by vagina-headed squid monsters armed with extremely bright flashlights.
Humans find the blue-white beams from the alien flashlights as irresistible as, say, that fragrance that wafts out into the mall from a Cinnabon shop, so they flock to it like moths to a flame. Problem is, when they get to the source, the squid monsters suck them up by the thousands with airborne DirtDevils.
Once the hapless humans are onboard the alien vacuum cleaners, the squiddies snap off the top of each human’s skull as easily as you might open a beer bottle, yank out the brain and spinal column, and stuff the still-wriggling mass into the brainless bodies of adorable baby vagina-headed squid monsters, who, having been brought to life by the Ultimate Stem Cell injection, go scuttling off to round up more human victims.
This all has the makings of a great latter-day Independence Day, but, unfortunately, it all falls apart pretty quickly. And while we could have forgiven the plot holes and inconsistencies, both the ending (in which our hero actually becomes an adorable baby squid monster but, inexplicably, retains his humanity and memory) and the *lack* of an ending (as the closing credits run, we see the hero *maybe* running off with his girlfriend, who is going to have a heck of a time bringing *this* guy home to mother) point to sloppy film making, an exhausted budget, and filmmakers who don’t give a rip about the story … so why should we?
The harsh response from audiences and critics seems to have surprised the producers. A lesson, perhaps: if you want your filmmaking experience to have a satisfying ending, your movie better have one.
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