Skylin3s

Skylin3s is the third and final film in the “Skyline” trilogy that started back in 2010 with the original, not-entirely-terrible Skyline, and then followed up with the complete garbage festival Beyond Skyline in 2017.

Part 2 ends with Rose (Lindsey Morgan) on the bridge of one of the alien “harvester” ships, getting ready to “take the fight to them.” In Skylin3s, we learn that the mission actually went sideways, with Rose hesitating in the heat of battle, and was forced to shoot through one of their own ships to destroy the Armada ship, resulting in many friendly human and “pilot” (the name they give to the “good guy” aliens) deaths.

Now, several years later, Earth is in chaos, the population that isn’t dead or turned into pilots are spread thin, and having a bad time of it, generally speaking. Rose is hiding out in a camp near London, when she’s “recruited” for a new mission by Radford (Alex Siddig of DS9 fame.)

The mission? They need to retrieve the power core from the destroyed ship in order to power a new device to keep the pilots from reverting back to their “blue light” stage. If they don’t, all the pilots on Earth will revert and take over. The catch? The power core warped back to the alien homeworld just before the ship was destroyed.

So they’ve got to take a harvester and go get it, no matter what. Since Rose has certain abilities with the alien technology, due to her being born of a mother that had been exposed to the blue light (or whatever)… she’s needed to shut down the core so it can be brought home.

Along on this mission, besides Rose and Radford, are her “brother” Trent, the “pilot” from the last movie, another pilot named Violet; Leon, her assigned bodyguard (Jonathan Howard); Owens (Daniel Bernhardt) and Zhi (Cha-Lee Yoon.)

When Rose gets her hands on the core, it changes her and everything goes south. Not only that, but its discovered that Radford’s plan isn’t just to save humanity, but to exterminate the aliens altogether.

I’m going to just cut right to it. This movie is an improvement over Beyond Skyline. I would be surprised and sad if it weren’t an improvement. There wasn’t a lot of room to get worse.

For starters the acting is better. It’s still not great, but its better. Morgan and Siddig do a pretty decent job, at least. The story in Skylin3s actually makes sense, versus the “hey lets go to Laos” nonsense of the last one.

The problem is that Skylin3s gets bogged down on more than one occasion in what seems like endless battle scenes. Never ending gunfights and hand to hand with the various flavors of aliens, including the big bad smart guy alien, who stows away on the ship on its way back to Earth, leading to a very Aliens-like ending….

Oh, meanwhile back on Earth, there’s a doctor Mal (Rhona Mitra) who’s working on a permanent cure and this entire plot should have just been thrown on the floor. It matters nothing to the story, and I really don’t get why it’s there. Maybe just to fill time in between the fight scenes.

Speaking of fight scenes, I was almost going to give this a decent rating, until Huana (Yayan Ruhian) shows up and starts going all Bruce Lee on the aliens again like he did in the last one. Just, come on what? no…

The end result is once again just an average scifi action flick that really didn’t do it for me. It just didn’t. Thankfully I was grateful that Skylin3s improved over Beyond Skyline, but really hoped it would have the quality of the first in the series.

A solid 2.5 for Skylin3s.

Netflix: https://www.netflix.com/title/81137486

IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9387250/

Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylines_(film)

Rotten Tomatoes: https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/skylines