In that there’s an actual Skyline film franchise is a bit of a surprise. I saw the original Skyline and thought it had some interesting visuals and ideas but was ultimately not a very good flick. To my surprise, seven years later, Beyond Skyline was released and was alright. A decent (and better) movie. Now, three years after that, the third in the series is out and I’m baffled how and why. I mean, good on them for keeping on keeping on though. They have a vision and apparently money enough to justify their ongoing alien invasion flick with their scrappy and surprisingly good visual effects so all the credit.

So Skylines takes place after the brain-stealing aliens have basically been defeated. Earth is living with both the humans and the “pilots” – the alien bodies that have been implanted with stolen human brains. Earth is now taking the fight to the alien homeworld with the little girl (now grown up) from the first two flicks along for the ride. She has them there alien powers, you see, and can help find a magical, mystical drive system that will hand-wave some solution to something.

This movie doesn’t slow down often to explain the weird alien stuff… there are by-the-numbers exposition (and exposition reminder) scenes for sure and it’s not hard to follow. In fact, I think 50% of the dialog is out of the Big Book of Cliches (“we’ve got company”). And that’s a bit of an eye-rolling problem… it’s all pretty cheesy and there’s not much characterization.

But, hey, this is a big goony B grade scrappy alien invasion sci-fi flick with some pretty pedestrian action… nobody is demanding much from the script or the actors. For the majority of the movie, it holds up as a pretty average flick that’s borrowing plots and imagery from many other sci-fi flicks. In fact, it started to give me Stargate SG1 and Defiance tv show vibes.

But it also has a surprisingly good final act with some pretty great action scenes. It kind of came out of the blue and I started to groove on the flick more. In fact, it was enough to give it just a little bump in the rating… that and the sheer fact this low budget series keeps on going, getting crazier and bigger and more visually impressive each time.

Fans of the series (they exist, presumably) will want to see it and maybe people who dig them some B movie action might want to check the series out. It’s interesting it exists and its credit to the ambition of the producers, writers, and directors. I wish they would aspire to more though… would love to see what they could do with a better script.

Score: 80