Dirk Gadsden

There are awful movies, and then there are movies that are piles of horse manure rising like a arcing column from Texas to the moon. Little Fockers falls into the former category; it was rubbish, and deserved the Razzie it got. However, it did fall into a zone of failure¹ that enabled me to only remember a few (and far between) highlights (namely the focker/[redacted] puns as Jack vets Greg for the position of “Grandfocker”² and the quip by the EMS guy at the end about his father-in-law “accidentally” hitting a coffee table at a family gathering³) and forget the zombieific drudgery that was the rest of the movie.

Unfortunately, Skyline falls into the latter category. It’s like a brain-colonoscopy without the sedation or the pre-op laxatives: very messy and uncomfortable⁴. The plot is about as lively as a corpse (or Harrison Ford on a late night interview, the two are virtually indistinguishable), and the acting is either non-existent or contrived & emotionless. The actors of two main characters, Jarrod and Elaine, seemed to be under the impression that if they held their heads close together long enough or had extended sequences staring blankly (or pleadingly in Jarrod’s case, since he could either do grunting/angry/frustrated or what I like to call the ‘pleading puppy’ look), that some emotion would come out. However, like a grapefruit that’s already had its inside fruit compartments scraped of fruity bits, no more will come out no matter how much you squeeze/stare. And as for the great Donald Faison, the African American⁵ surgeon Turk from Scrubs and one of my favorite dramatic comedians: why? You were an incredibly entertaining actor in Scrubs, and your position as a semi-foil, semi-conspirator with Zach Braff was perfect. The performance in Skyline, however, was completely over-the-top and lacking in any depth whatsoever. It was like reading some apocalyptic Fox News headline while incredibly inebriated, you understand that something is happening on the screen, but it never really makes any sense and just seems to be full of shallow emotion (in the performance in Skyline that emotion was called testosterone and bravado). Also, I’m a big fan of character development, especially the dramatic sort; so the fact that the characters were as static as the (pre-1989) Berlin Wall was severely disappointing. The plot, acting, and associated directly human parts of the movie were, in general, like watching some rocks slide down a slope of mud, distinctly uninteresting and possessing the bizarre capability to make one want to quickly shovel down a massive can of baked beans and stand in front of a white wall and stare at it until one passes out from exhaustion or debilitating stomach aches and flatulence.

I’d also like to point out the blatant sexism of the film. The males make no attempt to involve the women in any decision making or in a role besides having a shocked look on their faces and being occasionally emotional; and when the do speak out, the males either blow them off, or in Jarrod’s case deploy the ‘pleading puppy’ system. As I learned as a child, “girls go to college to get more knowledge, boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider”. Got pump some iron guys, and let the women figure out how to survive⁶.

Now, to the other aspects of the film. The editing was the only part of the film that wasn’t terrible; it wasn’t great either, but it showed a measure of competency that I had begun to believe had totally disappeared. The score could be best described as non-existent half the time and florid, stereotypical, and completely unoriginal the other half. Honestly, the music during the credits conveyed more meaning than the entire rest of the score combined.

I’m saving the best of the criticism for last, however. What in the name of all that is holy, right, loving, caring morally just, ethically proper, responsible, engaged, and all the other good things on the face of this earth happened to the special effects? This movie was produced by the company that did the effects for it. Essentially it was an ad for what they could accomplish. The result of their efforts, however, was like a mom-and-pop auto store advertisement during the Super Bowl commercials. The effects honestly felt little-league; I’ve seen single guys do stuff just as impressive as this, and that was a few years ago. Honestly, I wish I had footage of Brad Pitt looking slightly to the side of the camera, wearing aviator sunglasses, and eating a cheeseburger⁷ or doing boring stand-up that I could key in front of the video. (Alternatively, one could sub in Leonardo DiCaprio explaining physics or Daniel Craig driving an Aston Martin in circles⁸.) It was the antithesis of Jaws. The shark is scary because you don’t see it; these aliens were about as intimidating as Dora the Explorer is to “Fox and Friends”… actually, they are terrified of those foreign-language-speaking Latin American immigrants (or for that matter any sort of multiculturalism or tolerance). How about this? The aliens are about as frightening as zombies are to the character Tallahassee from Zombieland⁹. And the alien props the characters interacted with looked like plastic toys. Hell, I was more scared of the aliens from Independence Day, at least they didn’t seem a poor combination of Distict 9 nastiness and Crysis (the video game) tentacle’iness. (I was also more scared of the Crysis aliens.) The best word to describe those special effects would be boring, and that is a very bad word to use to describe effects. I honestly can’t see what they did with their $10-20 million budget, those must have been some damn fine craft services. Perhaps they should have named the movie Skybuffet and just done long pans across delicious meats, pastas, soups, salads, breads, desserts, and other delectables.