Comic-Con: Skyline Footage Description

What the hell is Skyline?

That was the question that's been wracking my brain ever since seeing the film's title plastered across, appropriately, a massive skyline. The premise makes it sound suspiciously like Battle: Los Angeles, with an extraterrestrial force descending on LA to wipe out civilization. It also has one big knock against it on the outset: the film is directed by the Brothers Strause, the same duo behind AVP: Requiem.

But much to my surprise, Skyline looks pretty damn cool. The brothers explained that the film was motivated by their inability to get any projects off the ground with studios, so they opted to do everything themselves in and around their Los Angeles apartment building, with their in-house visual effects company, Hydraulix, providing the FX. There was literally no outside studio involvement whatsoever.

Hearing this, I was expecting some small scale invasion movie, with a lot of people sitting around and talking about what's going on outside. Instead, we were greated with a trailer that seeks to rival Transformers in its epic scale.

Here's a recap of what we saw:

A group of young adults are partying away one night in LA. Morning comes–pre-sunrise–and dozens of white lights descend across the city. Someone awakes, and sees the light. His face starts to become infected as he's drawn toward it, and he's sucked out the window. The rest of the group goes up to the roof to see what's going on, and discover massive alien ships lowering onto the lights.

Then the action beats kicked into gear: tentacles launch toward the lead characters; a huge alien foot stomps down beside them; an equally huge three-finger alien hand reaches from behind a skyscraper; dozens of jets dart through a city-wide firefight with organic alien ships; a jet is eviscerated and collides atop a building on which our protagonists are perched; and finally, the bottom of an alien ship opens up and hundreds if not thousands of people are sucked inside.

We also saw a clip from the film, showing Eric Balfour and Donald Faison heading up to the roof and watching in awe as smoke and white lights consume LA. Their awe quickly turns to terror as people far off in the distance are sucked into the sky, and they rush to a door to get back inside the building. The door is locked. A ship approaches them, and Faison anxiously tries to shoot the lock. At the last moment, a girl opens the door from the inside, and the light behind them immediately begins infecting her face. They dart inside, and slam the door behind them.

Watch for our video blog about the footage, which should be online later today (or as soon as we can find a stable internet connection).

Skyline will be released on November 12, 2010.