Worth: $15.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Frank Grillo, Bojana Novakovic, Iko Uwais, Callan Mulvey, Yayan Ruhian, Betty Gabriel, Antonio Fargas
Intro:
...an almost mathematically perfect example of a great B movie.
Seriously, who doesn’t want to see Frank Grillo (the better Purge movies, Captain America: The Winter Soldier) team up with Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian (The Raid and, bizarrely, Star Wars: The Force Awakens) to fight an alien invasion? Cinema has clearly been building to this moment. Draw the curtains across every screen – we’re done.
But in case you need more: Beyond Skyline follows on from the little-loved 2010 sci-fi dud Skyline, but jettisons almost every possible element thereof except for the basic premise, instead building a whole new and much better story, which should make connoisseurs of imaginative and cheerfully cheap B-movies absolutely giddy.
In the shell of a nut, Earth is invaded by a fleet of alien ships that hypnotise the population by use of weird blue lights before sucking them up into the air for nefarious purposes. Hard-drinking LA cop Mark Corley (Grillo at his grizzled best) finds himself going toe to toe with the invaders, teaming up with a rag-tag group of survivors, including transit worker Audrey (Aussie Bojana Novakovic) and homeless veteran Sarge (Antonio Fargas – yes, Huggy Bear), whose blindness makes him immune to the aliens’ hypnosis beams.
Of course, a square jaw, a service sidearm and a drinking problem aren’t much against a full-scaled extraterrestrial incursion, and our plucky heroes soon find themselves in the bowels of an alien mother ship, where they bump into a couple of leftovers from the original film: Elaine (Samantha Jean, taking over from Scottie Thompson in the first film), who is about to give birth after the aliens have accelerated her pregnancy, and her boyfriend Jarrod, formerly played by Eric Balfour, and now a human brain implanted into a robotic alien combat drone.
That seems worth repeating: a human brain implanted into a robotic alien combat drone.
A few quick action and effects sequences later and the ship has crashed in the jungles of Laos, where Corley and Audrey team up with a motley band of former drug runners, including the aforementioned Uwais, Ruhian, and Aussie Callan Mulvey, who are preparing to launch a counter strike from a hidden base in an abandoned jungle temple. Can this unlikely band of heroes take the fight to the invaders? Will the newborn Rose (Elaine and Jarrod’s baby), her DNA mysteriously messed with by the aliens, prove, to be the key to the future? Will Iko and Yahan machete hordes of aliens to death? Is Frank Grillo an underappreciated god of action cinema?
Yes, yes, yes, and yes.
Beyond Skyline is an almost mathematically perfect example of a great B movie. It never takes itself too seriously, yet it makes perfect sense within the confines of its own reality, cleaving to its internal logic and never fudging things for effect.
And frankly, it doesn’t need to: it’s designed to deliver maximum bang-for-buck. In a brisk 106 minutes you get an alien invasion, numerous gunfights, giant alien mecha wrecking stuff (yep, they just throw in some giant robots, and it makes perfect sense), Bojana Novakovic as a kind of K-Mart Sarah Connor (after she could do chin-ups), Frank Grillo murderlising dozens of aliens with a weird kind of talon-weapon he’s picked up along the way, and Uwais and Ruhian doing much the same with their blistering martial arts prowess.
It’s just so much fun, and done on a squillionth of the budget of comparable box office-busting fare – Thor: Ragnarok, perhaps? To be fair, Beyond Skyline lacks Marvel film’s self-deprecating wit, but the action scenes are certainly of comparable quality, with Skyline ahead on points in the vital Fighting Aliens with Penkat Silat category. Debut director Liam O’Donnell’s special effects background means he certainly knows how to get the most out of his obviously limited budget, and while you’re never in any doubt that you’re watching a cheap movie, you know that every single dollar is up there on the screen.
Beyond Skyline is skipping theatrical distribution in Australia and heading straight to home release, which is a shame – it’d be a hell of a film to watch with an engaged and enthusiastic audience on the big screen. Nonetheless, fans of fast and frenetic sci-fi action should definitely make the effort to get in front of it – it’s an instant classic of the genre.
