Beyond Skyline


Beyond Skyline is a 2017 American science fiction action film directed by Liam O'Donnell. It stars Frank Grillo, Bojana Novakovic, Iko Uwais, Callan Mulvey, Yayan Ruhian, Pamelyn Chee, Betty Gabriel, and Antonio Fargas. It is a direct sequel to the 2010 film Skyline, picking up where the first film left off.
The film was released on December 15, 2017 in the United States by Vertical Entertainment. Unlike its critically panned predecessor, Beyond Skyline received mixed reviews, with several critics calling it an improvement over the original. A third and final film, originally titled Skylines and then Skylin3s, again directed by O'Donnell and produced by the Strause brothers, is set for release in 2020.

Plot

Taking place at the same time of Skyline, Mark Corley, a Los Angeles police detective, helps his estranged son, Trent, out of jail just as an alien invasion begins. The entire population of the city is sucked into various spaceships by a blue light. Mark leads a group of surviving humans through underground subway tunnels to escape, though most of the humans are killed or abducted, one by one. The survivors – Mark, Trent, transit operator Audrey, and a homeless man known only as "Sarge", who is immune to the blue light due to his blindness – escape to the marina following the city's nuclear destruction, only to be abducted into the alien flagship by a towering alien tanker.
On board the spaceship, Mark tries to find his son and storms his way into various chambers, where he meets up with survivor Elaine and her transformed boyfriend Jarrod. Elaine explains that Jarrod retained control of his mind despite being transformed into a bio-mechanical alien soldier. Though Elaine is three months pregnant, her pregnancy has accelerated and she gives birth to a newborn daughter. Elaine dies during the delivery, and Mark and Jarrod team up to destroy the alien ship by setting alien explosives inside the ship's control systems. When Jarrod is killed when he fights the alien leader, Mark rescues Audrey but is too late to save his son. Trent has his brain taken and placed in another alien bio-mechanical machine creature. Sarge sacrifices himself so that Mark, Audrey and the baby can escape from the chamber. The dying Jarrod destroys the ship, which crashes in rural Laos.
As the alien spaceship repairs itself, Mark, Audrey and the baby are found by a pair of human siblings, outlaw Sua and his sister Kanya, who are evading both aliens and local militia. As they trek through the jungle, the group discovers that the human baby grows at an accelerated rate from a newborn into a three-year-old in just one day. Sua and Kanya lead Mark, Audrey, and the baby to a hidden human resistance hideout located in local ruins. There, Harper, a medical officer and former drug smuggler, examines the baby girl and learns about her unique DNA. Harper believes her blood may be the key to defeating the aliens due to her evolving DNA. Using the child's blood and recovered alien technology, Harper develops a serum he believes will free the bio-mechanical soldiers from alien control and restore their human personality. Though Sua insists on killing all the bio-mechanical soldiers, Mark convinces Sua to allow him to save Trent.
While on a patrol, Kanya encounters a four-legged tanker alien and sacrifices herself by luring it into an old minefield left over from the Vietnam war. Though she destroys it, she unwittingly gives away their location to the alien ships searching for the human newborn child. They converge on the human base. During the resulting battle between the aliens and the humans, several members of the human resistance, including Harper, are killed. Mark enters a grounded alien ship, where he uses Harper's serum to turn the mind-controlling blue light into a red light that frees the mind-controlled bio-mechanical soldiers. Before he can deploy it, the alien leader and his horde of alien warriors attacks the human resistance and disables the light. Trent, his mind restored after encountering his father, fights back inside a giant alien tanker. While the alien leader is busy fighting Trent, the child fixes and deploys the red light, freeing the bio-mechanical soldiers, and Trent defeats the alien leader. With Earth saved, Audrey names the girl Rose after Mark's deceased wife.
Ten years later, Rose, now a fully-grown adult, has taken control of an alien ship, and Trent is her second-in-command. Rose leads freed bio-mechanical soldiers and humans in an assault on the other alien ships around the Moon, including the mothership.

Cast

In November 2014, Variety announced that Iko Uwais would join the cast, alongside Frank Grillo, Bojana Novakovic, and Yayan Ruhian. Liam O’Donnell wrote the script for the film, also wrote the script for the first film, will now direct as well as produce with Greg and Colin Strause serving as producers also. The Strause Brothers were the directors of the first film, Skyline. Matthew Chausse will also produce. Uwais and Ruhian will also serve as fight choreographers on the film.
The film's visual effects and production were done by Hydraulx.

Filming

began in December 2014, with shooting in Yogyakarta and Batam, Indonesia. and Toronto, Ontario, Canada. The finale of the film was shot in the Indonesian Prambanan temple complex, though the script suggests that it is located in Laos.

Release

The first film had a PG-13 rating but the sequel was given an R rating by the MPAA. On Alien Day 2017, set photos were released to show what the aliens in Beyond Skyline looked like for the sequel. The first trailer was released on August 16, 2017. The film premiered at Sitges Film Festival October 8, 2017. The film went on to screen at several genre film festivals including Toronto After Dark, Trieste Science+Fiction, Austin Other Worlds, Boston Sci-Fi Film Festival, Rio Grind Vancouver, and was the closing night film at the inaugural Cinepocalypse in Chicago on November 9. Beyond Skyline was released on VOD and Digital on December 15, 2017, and on DVD and Blu-Ray on January 8, 2018.

Reception

Critical response

, the film holds a 65% approval rating on review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes, based on 20 reviews with an approval rating of 5.51 out of 10. On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 46 out of 100, based on 8 critics, indicating "mixed or average reviews".