Review of Beyond Skyline (2017) by Tim W — 04 May 2018

It's got polish and you can see where the money has been chucked about. But by the same measure, you can see where that money has been siphoned away from. And that would be a decent cast and scriptwriters.

It would be OK if it wasn't so derivative. As a genre, sci- fi has always stood on the shoulders of giants, each new offering struggling to get away from what has gone before. But the comparisons here are so obvious.

Predator. Independence Day. War of the Worlds. It's bordering on shameless how they've lifted the ideas. I thought the blind guy might give the plot an avenue to explore, but he proved to be just another mouth with nothing to say.

One line that did resonate, and one that will stay with me as I watch other overly macho offerings where everyone is a muthaf***ah, is the female train driver's intervention between two testosterone-fuelled boy men struggling for supremacy.

'Put your dicks away, boys'.she wearily says. How often will I be saying that in future as I watch yet another tedious exchange between unorthodox movie coppers or gangland criminals? And how often did I wish the scriptwriter had followed his own advice in this, particularly when the martial arts bit started? Watchable, I suppose, if you've never seen a sci fi movie made in the last forty years.

But there's way better out there.