Beyond Skyline (2017)

Sequels to unloved science fiction films rarely arrive with ambition, and Beyond Skyline arrives with something better: competence. Liam O'Donnell, who wrote the 2010 original, takes the director's chair and moves the action from a Los Angeles high-rise to a crashed alien flagship, then to rural Laos. Frank Grillo plays a detective who storms a spaceship to retrieve his estranged son and loses him anyway. The film is brisk and entirely uninterested in explaining itself. A blind homeless man survives the blue abduction light because he cannot see it. That is the level of scientific rigor on offer, and the film knows it.

The casting is the most interesting thing here. Iko Uwais and Yayan Ruhian, veterans of Indonesian martial cinema, anchor the second half as resistance fighters, and they choreographed their own fights. Black, Latino, and Asian performers fill out the ensemble without a single line acknowledging the fact. This is diversity as logistics, not as sermon. The film's women get a resistance captain and a heroic sacrifice, which is standard action grammar, no more. The multi-ethnic survivors fight a common enemy and never once discuss what that means.

Strip away the alien hardware and a lean B-movie sits there, preaching nothing. Its Vietnam War minefield is a plot convenience. Its accelerated baby is a device for a third act. The moral instruction, such as it is, arrives through explosions and severed limbs. We are left with a film of modest virtues and negligible ideological ambition, which in this climate reads almost as a novelty. It is a sequel that improves on its predecessor by lowering its sights and hitting them.