Beyond Skyline, the over-the-top sequel to 2010’s “worldwide alien invasion on a budget” movie
Skyline. The first film in the franchise set so much of the story in a single high-rise condo, where a few fearful survivors hole up to escape the aliens, that it’s a full-on shock when directors Greg and Colin Strause finally reveal that they have bigger ambitions than a bottle-episode film. The sequel, produced by the Strauses with Liam O’Donnell taking over as director, took the story halfway around the world, and morphed it into a joyously trashy martial-arts pulp saga.
The series’ biggest hallmark has always been its outrageousness: the first film introduces grotesque alien technology that rips human brains out of their bodies, brainwashes them, and uses them to run huge, heavily armored drone warriors called Pilots. The sequel sees an infant infected with alien DNA and growing into a child with powers over the aliens — just in time to help the survivors fight off newer and more eye-popping threats. Every development along the way in the first two films was imaginative, unexpected, and gleefully over-the-top violent. So it feels strange that the series capper,