Rating summary

Movie		2.5
Video		4.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		0.0
Overall		2.5

Beyond Skyline Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman January 22, 2018

Skyline was an object lesson in “if you build it, they will come,” even if what you’ve built has been seen (lots of times) before, and even when those modern day oracles known as film critics say what you’ve built is basically a piece of garbage. There have been so many alien invasion movies stretching back decades now that the genre has arguably been exhausted, even with the uptick in grandeur that CGI offered the special effects wizards often assigned to such productions. Skyline had the requisite SFX majesty, but from a narrative standpoint it was something of a mess, as my colleague Ken Brown pointed out in his Skyline Blu-ray review. And, yet — people came to Skyline in significant enough quantities to generate a sizable profit for the first film, though evidently this sequel was at least in the planning stages before any tickets were ever sold for the first film. Skyline’s co-writer Liam O’Donnell has been promoted to writer-director for this sophomore entry in what may be one of the longest gestating “franchises” in history (this sequel is appearing over seven years after the original), and while this may be damning with faint praise, Beyond Skyline is at least marginally more coherent than its progenitor. It also ups the special effects wizardry on display, as a tortured Los Angeles cop (is there any other kind in a film like this?) named Mark Corley (Frank Grillo) finds himself (literally) swept up in an alien invasion. Somewhat hilariously (and a different kind of object lesson about the film industry), though Beyond Skyline is at least arguably a "better" film than Skyline (again, a rather low bar to overcome), it completely tanked at the box office, not even breaking a paltry one million in receipts according to some online sites.

Mark is first seen taking a swig of hooch in his truck outside of the Los Angeles police headquarters, and of course it turns out the guy is an emotional wreck, recovering from the death of his wife while also trying the shepherd his trouble prone son Trent (Jonny Weston) toward a happy life, when the kid keeps getting in sticky situations and is avoiding jail time simply because Mark’s buddies on the force are helping to keep that from happening. Mark picks up Trent from a holding room and because Mark’s truck malfunctions, the two end up on the subway, where they and a number of other passengers are pummeled when something up top happens, leading to a sudden power loss and initially make Beyond Skyline play a bit like the old Sylvester Stallone flick Daylight.

It’s actually not immediately clear, but Beyond Skyline is evidently taking place in tandem with the events of the first film, though aside from the character of Jarrod (Tony Black), there’s really not that much linking the two entries. That is made even more clear when the bulk of this film sticks to interiors of alien vessels rather than apartments around Los Angeles. Within moments of the subway fracas, both Trent and Mark are sucked up into the lair of the aliens, where (in one of the film’s kind of fun conceits), a kind of robotic entity rips the tops of heads off of poor humans so that brains can be harvested.

Mark ends up meeting a number of other characters, and becomes a surrogate father of sorts for a baby that’s born in the bowels of the alien ship, a character who has a rather fast growth spurt. But as with the first Skyline, there’s little to no context given for all the mayhem, and it’s never quite clear why exactly these particular aliens are doing what they’re doing, nor what the ultimate strategy might be to confront them. This is therefore a film with lots of scenes where hapless if not totally helpless humans actually take aim at aliens with pistols and the like, with expected results.

Beyond Skyline traffics in about every alien invasion trope you can think of, but while it’s about as standard as you might imagine, the special effects work is actually pretty decent looking, at least considering the fact that this wasn’t a megabudgeted film. Performances are generally decent as well, with Grillo making an for an appealingly grizzled hero. The whole baby scenario leads to a predictable finale that harkens back to the very opening of the film, which deals with a woman being wheeled into an ER facility, and which is obviously meant to set things up for another sequel that frankly may never arrive. All of that said, it’s a little hard to discern what exactly O’Donnell sought to accomplish with this putative sequel. Evidently sometimes when you build it, no one comes.

Beyond Skyline Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Beyond Skyline is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Vertical Entertainment with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. The IMDb lists the Red Epic Dragon as having digitally captured the imagery, and I am assuming this was finished at a 2K DI. The results are typically very sleek and sharp looking, though there are a few recurrent issues with noise creeping into some of the darker moments (notably some in the subway tunnel). There are a few kind of curious drop offs in quality, which made me wonder if in fact some parts of the film had perhaps been captured at lower resolutions (intentionally, perhaps to give it a "fly on the wall" ambience). Detail levels are generally very good to excellent, though the grading scheme employed in the film, which bathes huge swaths of the proceedings in deep blue tones, clearly depletes fine detail levels at times, which can be spotted in some of the screenshots accompanying this review. CGI looks surprisingly well detailed most of the time, with very little of the kind of soft quality that often creeps into such efforts.

Beyond Skyline Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Beyond Skyline features an intermittently forceful DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 mix, one which attains its best immersion in expected elements like the initial attack scene (which includes a pretty elaborate set of explosions, including one that appears to be nuclear). Once the film segues to its longer scenes inside various ships, there's a nice cloistered feeling to the sound design, with discrete placement of individual effects in the surround channels, often with a kind of "echo-y" ambience that reinforces the supposed environment. Dialogue and score are both rendered clearly and cleanly on this problem free track.

Beyond Skyline Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

There are no supplements of any kind on this Blu-ray disc, perhaps one indication that this release is being treated as a write off.

Beyond Skyline Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

The good news is that Beyond Skyline is better than Skyline. The bad news is that's not saying much. Technical merits are generally fine for those considering a purchase.