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Skyline (2010)
A surprisingly fun monster survival film!
In case you didn't know, this is a movie about invading aliens. The filmmakers certainly wanted you to know, since they decided the opening scene should be a copy-pasted segment from 20 minutes later on, with shiny lights and weird stuff happening. This is obviously designed to overcome the biggest glaring flaw with the production: characters you don't care about.
Skyline begins in a similar fashion to another recent monster movie, Cloverfield, with a bunch of friends having a party before all hell breaks loose. During this quarter of an hour, you'll be very tempted to abandon the film, since the primary characters are so inherently soulless and boring. Thankfully, that clip at the start lets you know that interesting stuff will happen eventually; and once it does, those characters can run and girly-scream with the best of them.
This is a good ol' monster survival fest, where all you really need to worry about is who's going to die, how it'll happen, and if anybody gets out alive. It is not deep science-fiction, and you should leave any ideas about that at the door. The aliens and other visual effects are wonderfully done, with a good few surprises in store for the viewer. The tension is kept high, with your wondering if death is around each next corner. And, despite the weak characters, this ride is quite a bit of fun! It even has nice low tension moments to balance out the high tension ones, giving you rest points along the way; something other action films tend to forget >>looking at you, Transformers.
All you really need to do here is turn your brain off for 90 minutes and enjoy the ride. It's big, it's loud, it's fun.
20 Million Miles to Earth (1957)
Great monster effects. See it for that, and nothing else.
Ray Harryhausen, the king of stop motion animation, presents a wonderfully realized creature from Venus in this film. That is the one and only reason to see 20 Million Miles to Earth. Everything else in the film is, frankly, a train wreck.
The entire plot consists of nothing more than rocket ship crashes, creature escapes, gotta find the creature; and that's all in the first 10 minutes. The rest of the film is simply a showcase for a very talented animator. Scenes involving the creature and the actors are very nearly seamless, and really allow you to suspend your disbelief and become immersed in the adventure.
The writers make a few attempts at subplots, like the boy who thinks Texas is a cowboy country near America, and a half-hearted romantic interest. However, none of that goes anywhere interesting, and everything always falls back on the monster chase. The entire film ends up seeming like nothing more than a delivery vehicle for the final line of dialog, which is nearly the only thoughtful writing in the script. The actors do an admirable job with the material they're given, but a bad script is still a bad script.
As a one-shot viewing, the film can entertain nicely. The monster looks great and there are at least a couple good action scenes. If that's all you need, that's what 20 Million Miles to Earth has to offer.
Online Nation (2007)
Good idea, horrible execution
A show that features all the latest and greatest Web clips that have the online community buzzing, gathered together in one convenient weekly showcase? Sounds good to me!!
Unfortunately, Online Nation is not that show. The critical flaw here is that these clips are not the latest--many date to the very beginning of the Internet (or closely enough), and most do not come remotely close to being the greatest.
Online Nation features a seemingly random collection of very short clips, typically clocking in at approx. 30 seconds, which are average at best, and moronic as a rule. The constant reminders encouraging you to go to the show Web site and upload clips there if you want to see them also gives the distinct impression that the staff is hardly combing the net for this stuff. As such, the lack of quality or relevance to the online community is hardly surprising. You will see plenty of college prank videos and other stupidity, while the truly original, surprising, and funny content which you can easily find on YouTube or any other video site is completely ignored. Whether this is for legal reasons or not, I don't know. However, the result is a show that is not worth your time and is insulting to the intelligence of the online community.
Spend these 30 minutes browsing random links on YouTube. I guarantee that you will be more entertained than you would be while watching this failed concept of a show.