MovieChat Forums > Skyline (2010) Discussion > Why do so many people hate this movie?!

Why do so many people hate this movie?!


It's a straight forward alien invasion movie.
It's not any different from "Battle: Los Angeles" or "War of the Worlds".
I want to understand the hate.
None of this "WORST MOVIE EVER!!!11!1! DERP!!11" crap.
Why exactly do people hate this movie so much?

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Because it's bad? I couldn't watch it for long, it was awful from the start.

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People keep saying the aliens won. If that had been the end, the film would have been a lot better, but they had to ruin it by adding on the magic orange brain thing and the main guys surviving...

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[deleted]

It was an entertaining movie. I think it is downrated. Mine is 6/10. Impressive visual effects and kind of good action scenes. However the acting and plot could be much much better.

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I wholly enjoyed this movie. There was nothing about the creative choices in it that i disagree with.

-- Sent from my 13 year old P.O.S. Desktop®

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It IS different from "Battle: Los Angeles" and "War of the Worlds" and "Independence Day" and a dozen other standard alien invasion movies - it's much better !
Interesting mix of genres, no boring Hollywood cliches, great CGI. I don't understand why people hate it so much too.

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I really do believe people hate it because it doesn't follow a familiar pattern and go the typical route of invasion movies (Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Red Dawn etc) where the good guys win against all odds.

Admittedly, it doesn't help that it was miss-marketed as a sci-fi invasion movie and that it presents the ray of hope and revenge for humanity during the credits.

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[deleted]

A lot of people refuse to accept that a movie like this could be made for $10 mil+ considering less entertaining movies with A-list casts cost upwards of $75-100+ million dollars.

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[deleted]

Battle Los Angeles and War Of The Worlds? Are you seriously comparing those utterly generic blockbusters to this fresh take on the alien invasion genre?

🐺 Boycott movies that involve real animal violence (& their directors) 🐾

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As far as entertainment goes I rate this around 6 out of 10.

Plot? A bunch of aliens arrive to do bad stuff to humanity. What could happen that would satisfy people?

Maybe one of the aliens feels bad about all of this....he travels to Tibet and gets guidance from a monk....then he settles down in Chicago, finds a girl to fall in love with, and travels the world for self discovery when he's told he has a fatal disease. Is that all right? ( of course something this wouldn't happen )

Guess what! I've got a fever, and the only prescription is MORE COWBELL! -Bruce Dickinson-

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If you dig deep enough, you will find out why this movie has bad ratings.

When this movie was being made, there was a huge legal fight about the effects team from Battle LA working on Skyline.

Now this movie was on a low budget and was going to be released either before or at the same time as Battle LA, and Sony and its execs were having none of it, though the legal battle would have been resolved too late to have any effect for Battle LA. So what they did was pay a bunch of students to do some "marketing". This "marketing" was basically to go around giving bad ratings to Skyline on places like IMDB, metacritic etc, basically flood it with negative ratings and have it go viral so that even legit people start bashing it too cause its the popular thing to do. Those same students were also supposed to spread positive word about Battle LA.

Since Skyline was a small release the relative amount of negative reviews was very high. Paired with that it wasnt a perfect movie and didnt have a hollywood happy ending caused it to just keep the negativity rolling in.
There are interviews with people who were paid to do these things, but they quickly squashed the interviews calling them lies, and marketing people for the companies denying any involvement.

Im pretty certain this still happens today, but Skyline being a small movie really felt the full brunt of these dirty tactics. Its really sad, cause its actually a good movie thats very different from other in the genre. Its at least a 6/10, or even 7/10.

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" what they did was pay a bunch of students to do some "marketing". This "marketing" was basically to go around giving bad ratings to Skyline on places like IMDB, metacritic etc "


Thats total conjecture.

I suppose these vox pops after the movie, were also Sony plants?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EEYlfmdvf5g

Not to mention every professional and youtube movie reviewer..

I wasn't aware of the Battle L.A. vs Skyline thing. Few audience members are that engaged with the industry news.

Personally, I just wanted a new scifi movie. Especially, since the massive Australian advertising campaign made it look epic like 'Independence Day'.

However, I was deeply disappointed within the first 10 minutes with the schlocky horror movie setup.

1) Personally, I had no issue with the apocalpytic downer ending. However, shock twist endings are often used to mask poor writing. ".. And then he woke up and it was all a dream."
This trope is nowhere near original and been done better: 28 Weeks Later, The Day After, ...
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/DownerEnding/Film

2) I don't particularly care that the film was made on a tiny budget. It was certainly promoted like a Hollywood blockbuster. When you spend $10M on production, and at least 2x or 3x on advertising, its probably a scam.

There are plenty of better low-budget sci-fi films such as District 8 and Mad Max.
Those films were low budget by necessity, whereas this was an elaborate tax write-off by an LA Special FX team.

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[deleted]

I am guessing everyone who hates this movie does so because they saw it before they heard it was *beep* And paid movie theater prices to find out it was *beep*

I am sure if you heard it was *beep* and paid $5 or less to watch it, you might have enjoyed it.

The trailers were pretty much selling it as Independence Day.

And the characters were in no way relatable or endearing.

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I found this film from googling something like "Good low-rated movies IMDB" and this was in one of the lists. Watched it last night.

No, it's not Aliens, or even Independence Day, but it's a solid action sci-fi with some nice jump scares and unexpected moments. I've seen worse rated higher is what I'll say, and while I find the IMDB ranking system to be (all in all) a fairly reliable barometer of a film's quality, it let this one down. I think the film featuring C/B-list type actors hurts the film's credibility, as does the very generic-looking sunny central LA location, but you forget about both of these things when the main plot kicks in.

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