There’s nothing about the 2010 alien invasion thriller Skyline to suggest that it would launch an ongoing franchise, now going into its third installment. Directed by brothers Colin and Greg Strause, special effects veterans who haven’t directed another feature film since, it’s a contained story that takes place almost entirely in a single upscale high-rise apartment building, as the characters try to escape the aliens that have invaded Los Angeles. The low-budget movie benefits from the Strauses’ special effects experience, but the somewhat cool-looking effects are outweighed by the annoying characters, terrible acting, clumsy dialogue and complete lack of suspense.
Skyline was a modest box-office hit, but it generated enough of a cult following that original co-writer Liam O’Donnell was able to take over the franchise and make his directorial debut with the straight-to-video sequel Beyond Skyline in 2017. It’s easier to see why Beyond Skyline has built up a fan base, with its awkward tonal shifts, hammy performances, cheap-looking (but creative) special effects, and central performances from B-movie staples Frank Grillo and Iko Uwais. O’Donnell improbably added lots of martial arts action to the alien invasion story, along with a bizarre mythology that was only hinted at in a post-credits scene in the original Skyline.
O’Donnell returns with the annoyingly titled Skylin3s, expanding the scope even further. Grizzled storyteller Grant (James Cosmo) opens the movie with narration that serves as a recap of the previous two films (complete with clips), although the narrative has gotten so convoluted that anyone new to the series is likely to be hopelessly lost. The main character here is Rose Corley (Lindsey Morgan), who was introduced in Beyond Skyline as a baby with special abilities thanks to her exposure to alien rays while in the womb. The aliens caused her birth to be accelerated, and she grew freakishly quick once she was born, ending up as a full-grown adult in the Beyond Skyline epilogue, which took place just 10 years after her birth.
Grant also glosses over the events set up by that epilogue, which seemed to promise an epic battle between aliens and humans, but is largely dismissed within a minute or two of narration. Skylin3s takes place 15 years after the alien invasion, and Earth now looks vaguely post-apocalyptic, although the aliens are no longer a threat. As depicted in Beyond Skyline, though, the aliens were harvesting human brains, which they placed inside artificial bodies that they used as pilots and soldiers. Thanks to Rose’s poorly defined alien powers, all of those pilots were freed from alien control, and there are now three billion alien bodies with human brains living on Earth, just going about their business.
Rose and Grant both live in what looks like a refugee camp outside London, where hybrids, as they’re called, co-exist with regular humans, in a society like something out of District 9 or Alien Nation, although its full implications are never really explored. Instead, Rose is recruited by General Radford (Alexander Siddig) for a new space mission, this time to the aliens’ home planet, known as Cobalt-1. A mysterious virus is raging through the hybrid population, threatening to revert them back to mindless killing machines, and only some alien doohickey can reverse the course. Rose reluctantly agrees to go along to provide support from her alien powers, whatever those actually are.
Meanwhile, in an underdeveloped subplot back on Earth, Dr. Mal (Rhona Mitra) is working on a serum to cure the virus, thus potentially rendering the entire main storyline irrelevant. The movie is both buried in plot details and sloppily paced, so that important plot points are frequently elided, and it’s often difficult to tell what the characters’ immediate goal is in any given moment. As dumb as the original Skyline was, at least the plot was clear. At this point in the series, virtually nothing is clear, and O’Donnell spends much of Skylin3s working hard to make the narrative more tangled and confusing, when all his audience wants is some more cool fight scenes.
There aren’t nearly as many of those in Skylin3s as there were in Beyond Skyline, although Indonesian martial arts star Yayan Ruhian makes a brief return as his Beyond Skyline character, delivering possibly the most ridiculous action scenes in the entire series. The over-the-top ridiculousness was part of what made Beyond Skyline endearing, even as the storyline remained grim and violent. Skylin3s is more straightforward, with the majority of the running time devoted to the mission to Cobalt-1. O’Donnell draws heavily from the Aliens and Riddick movies, but his knock-off versions of sci-fi classics are pretty weak, and the clunky alien monsters are never particularly threatening.
The allegiances among the characters on the Cobalt mission shift so frequently that they’re hard to keep track of, and the goals are so hazy that none of the major reversals come off as shocking (or even explainable). There are fewer fight scenes than in Beyond Skyline, and the action on the planet’s surface, where the team encounters shadow creatures that look like they came right out of Pitch Black, is murky and hard to follow, often just a blue-black smudge on the screen. Morgan brings an appropriately intimidating presence to her role as Rose (a ridiculous character who is still, essentially, an overgrown child), but the other members of her team are interchangeable cannon fodder. The attempts at emotional resonance are just as ineffective as the terrible pseudo-badass one-liners that O’Donnell doubles down on.
For the small but devoted fan base of the Skyline series, teases of Grillo’s character from Beyond Skyline or callbacks to previous plot points or occasional impressive martial-arts maneuvers may be enough to sustain interest for the sequel that’s blatantly set up at the end. For anyone else, the existence of Skylin3s will be as baffling as its muddled plot.
Starring Lindsey Morgan, Alexander Siddig, Daniel Bernhardt, Jonathan Howard, Rhona Mitra, Cha-Lee Yoon and James Cosmo, Skylin3s opens Friday, Dec. 18 in select theaters and on VOD.