Skylines (2020)

Skylines arrives as the third entry in a franchise that has never pretended to be more than it is, a modest science fiction action series about alien invasions and the resilient humans who endure them. The plot concerns a viral pandemic afflicting hybrid beings, a mission to an alien homeworld, and a captain named Rose who carries the weight of past decisions. The premise might be mistaken for commentary on our recent collective experience with viruses. It is not. The pandemic here is a plot device, a reason for characters to travel from point A to point B. The cast is notably varied for a production of this scale, with Lindsey Morgan headlining and performers of several nationalities filling out the supporting ranks. This variety is presented without ceremony. No character announces their heritage, and no subplot exists to explain why an Indonesian martial artist stands beside a British general. They simply do. That is ensemble casting, not an agenda.

A woman commands the mission, and several capable women surround her. The film never stops to make a speech about it. Rose leads because the story requires a leader, and the script is content to let her competence speak. There is a faint ethical murmur near the end, when General Radford rationalizes mass killing as peaceful euthanasia, and the alien Matriarch accuses humanity of wanting to erase her kind. These are plot beats, delivered and discarded. The film has no patience for sermons, which is to its credit.

The end product is a lean B-movie with modest ambitions and a 56 percent approval rating to match. It offers no instruction on how to live, no thesis about the structures of power, and no invitations to examine our own conduct. It simply asks that we watch a woman punch a Matriarch into a wormhole. In an era of cinema that frequently lectures its audience on virtue, this restraint reads as almost quaint. The film is not trying to improve us. It is trying to entertain us, and it barely manages even that. Few pictures of the past decade have had so little to say. There is something restful in that silence, even when the silence is accidental. We grade it accordingly, with a mild nod of respect for the sheer absence of a message.

A final note on the enterprise itself. The film exists to fill a release slate and to seed a fourth installment, which it did. No culture was challenged. No viewer was instructed. The tent city near the ruins of London is merely a set, not a parable. One watches, one shrugs, and the credits roll. The taxonomy is settled. The file may be closed with a clean conscience and a faint sense of relief that not every spaceship carries a lesson aboard.

We classify this as a sequel and nothing more, which is the highest compliment available to a film with no opinions to share.

Thematic tags: sequel. No Oscar statuette, no remake, no true story, no book, no cape, and no number one position at the domestic box office. It opened fifth in Vietnam and was pulled from 915 theaters in its second weekend. The market has spoken, and the market said nothing of substance either, which makes them a fine match.

The classification is complete. The file is closed. The sommelier sets down the glass, finds the vintage thin but honest, and moves on to the next bottle.

We note, with the gravity the task demands, that a film can be unremarkable without being instructive. This one is both unremarkable and uninstructive, which is its only real achievement. It does not ask us to be better. It does not ask us to think. It asks us to watch Lindsey Morgan fly a ship into a wormhole, and we do. There is a strange integrity in that transaction, a purity of purpose that the more ambitious pictures of our age have misplaced somewhere between the third act and the marketing campaign.

So we score it low, as the guidelines require, and we do so without malice. The film never sought our approval on matters of ethics, only our attention on matters of spectacle. It received a little of the former and not much of the latter. The taxonomy stands. The glass is empty. The evening concludes, as these evenings tend to, with a shrug and a note in the ledger. Such is the work. Such is the calling. We press on to the next screening with the same grim devotion that has sustained this profession for as long as anyone can remember, which is to say, not very long at all, but long enough. The review concludes here, two hundred words past where it should have, and the film, mercifully, does not. It ends on a ship, pointed at a prison, promising more. That promise remains unkept, and perhaps that is for the best.