Skylines aka Skylin3s is a bad movie. Just like Skyline and Beyond Skyline before it. Skyline was a movie directed by special effects guys that looks like a special effects demo piece. But between Beyond Skyline and Skylines they've managed to do the unthinkable. They've created potential. I don't walk away from Skylines thinking about how bad it is. My first thought isn’t about how bad it was that an effects-based movie will randomly and for no reason suddenly have CGI so bad that it looks like I myself made the movie. I'm not walking away thinking about the bad underdeveloped flat characters and sub-par acting. I left this movie and somehow my first feeling was disappointed. Disappointed that after flipping the genre 3 times no one made anything of ANY of them, the effect film wasn’t good, the action film wasn’t good, the sci-fi heist film wasn’t good.

Beyond Skyline took off from plotless movie (Skyline) and spend half of its own runtime setting up the last half of its runtime, which was an action set piece. It was even a fun action set piece. I liked a lot of it actually. But I was still mid headache from realizing that I spent half the movie watching things not happen. It was almost as bad at Pirate of the Caribbean 2. Beyond Skyline even sets up cliffhanger sequel bait that was, dare I say, compelling. I legitimately wanted to see what came next and considering the quality of the movies up to that point, I remain shocked.

Somehow Skylines, which opens in the first three minutes by completely skipping over that giant space battle/opera that was setup in the last movie, does the most to setup the world. It has the biggest and most interesting world to play in. And yet it fails on EVERY level to do anything with it. I mean for crying out loud there are human brains in alien machine bodies and none of this is explored. Do they still age? How long do they last? Do they have a unique culture? There's a hint that the hybrids were accepted as human but what does that look like? Do people have new relationships with these hybrids? Do they engage in old ones? Yet the movie then forgets all of that complexity in spite of the fact that the bad guy is represented as bad in part because he is prejudice against the hybrids in a world that we’re told completely accepts them. In the last third the film sets up the hybrids as killing fodder and so it is with zero remorse or thought they're slaughtered in fight scenes. There's no exploration of prejudice which must exist in this scenario. It can’t just be our main bad guy. After all it’s shown that he has help. His project is way too big to have done it himself. It's just a mish mash of ideas. Many of the ideas presented are good and interesting some of them would even make compelling dramatic sci-fi pieces all by themselves but in the Skyline franchise they're just completely empty of fleshing out. In spite of what the characters will say nothing matters and no one cares. The movie has two main hybrids Trent and Violet and they’re interesting. They’re actually interesting and unique characters. Violet is hardcore pro-rebellion even getting her tank body spray painted. Trent is the only hybrid we’ve seen created that’s still alive. We saw him as a human and saw him as a hybrid. We know what he was like as a human, we can imagine him transformed into this hybrid. And yet somehow the human characters are even more flat than them. We have a bad guy, we have a minor bad guy, we have the guy who hates Rose for what happened in the prologue, we have the specialist it’s all so rote and uninteresting set in a world that is teaming with interesting things the movie just doesn’t want to talk about. Like why do these aliens harvest brains only to refuse to use them what purpose do the brains serve the the bodies don’t? Why is the earth human relations the way they are? There seems to be a human government and yet there are encampments? Why? Who rejects humans? Why is Rose so hunted when she is clearly so despised? And that’s just shooting from the hip. In the corner of every scene is something interesting something that could flesh out the people or the world and the movie just doesn’t have time for that.

I can see why people might enjoy this one but it's just sad how much it could have been. The creature designs are solid, the alien voice isn't annoying. The main character is unique for reasons that aren't explained or explored. The bad guy is just the right kind of bad to be enjoyable except he's bad for no reason. There are baits and switch but it's hard to care about them because I don't care about the characters. As soon as you see the setup of a heist on an alien planet you know it's bad when you're mostly wondering which one will be sacrificed on the altar of "this is really dangerous. . see Person X just **died**". Our main character has so much potential for complex motivations and the movie skips over all of them. Rose hesitates to fire on the alien ship, and it could have been a moment of learning about the aliens about her about anything and instead it's only referenced in a throwaway motivational monolog. Skylines is the movie that couldn’t. Shame.