My dad watched this and decided to share it with me.
In the movie, aliens drop these big glowy things down, and if you look at them your skin and face get all black and zombie-corrupted, and you walk out the nearest window, but it goes away if you get them away from the light. After the light balls go away, the survivors head out and see these giant ships which turn out to have caught and are now sucking all the people into them. It’s at this point I began my argument that the aliens are not trying to kill us. These are alien conservationists.
Something terrible will happen soon and they’re trying to get us off the planet first. They didn’t bother contacting us because there’s no time and they know we probably would just use advance warning to try to dig in rather than believe them – assuming they even can communicate with us properly.
Dad says no, you’ll see they’re terrible and are really eating people.
The next wave are some smaller floating squid things which begin searching the buildings. I was expecting this to be the point they start just killing people, but no, they continue to suck anyone they find up. They manage to run one over with a car and then find the guy it ate is still inside and unharmed. Unfortunately, it turns out the squid things regenerate fast and it manages to get up again, although it’s clearly damaged. “See!” says my dad as it grabs the guy’s head. “They’re eating our heads now.”
“See!” I say, as we watch the drawn out sequence that seems to involve making sure the alien has the head just right before instantly removing it. “They’re clearly trying to preserve us because why else would it take the head and put in the storage pouch? It’s wobbling and struggling to move, it can’t carry his whole body so it’s taking his brain and they’ll just regrow a body for him later.”
“You’ll see!” Dad insists.
Things continue in this vein – with the exception of a few of the soldiers, the aliens seem to be trying to take everyone, even those injuring them in the process, and given the soldiers managed to nuke one of their ships and probably kill all the humans stored on it, that might not be because they’re mad but because they’re trying to avoid similar human losses.
Finally, the last surviving characters are sucked up onto the ship. “Now you’ll see!” Dad says.
Cut to several days later, where all the humans are lying in this gooey creepy looking place, groaning miserably. We see the various types of squid thingies picking up humans one by one. They still aren’t eating us! They’re removing the head and discarding the body. Then they plunk the brain into this weird goo that turns it blue, like the blue brain cores the main characters were ripping out of the squid thingies’ bodies.
They grab girl main character but stop upon realizing she’s pregnant and act very disturbed, because obviously cutting her head off would impact the baby, and move her to another section with all the pregnant women. This is all framed as look at how they’re going to evilly steal your babies, vulnerable pregnant women, but they sure seem invested in preventing any loss of life, don’t they?
We then see where the blue processed brains go – they’re getting plunked into other bodies, which look very apelike and then lope off. Clearly they’re just using our brains for something, right? Male main character’s brain glows red, though, and when it’s implanted he seems to still just be him and he runs off to save his pregnant female and fight the other aliens in a montage ending. (That, incidentally, was a low point of the movie – the rest of it is good at showing how utterly fucked we’d be in an alien invasion, then suddenly wish fulfillment flashes of an ending.)
“SEE?!”
No, the aliens are totally trying to save us. The blue brains got plunked into new, better bodies, ones that look like they were designed with us in mind and that probably can communicate with the hive mind or whatever so they know what’s going on, and are also probably immortal because all the other alien bodies we’ve seen can heal anything, including a nuke exploding inside of them. They exhibited intense concern for preserving our brains and didn’t even just throw them all in a vat when they’re done or something that might suggest they were just planning on recording our data rather than keeping us alive, they wanted to preserve even a barely-there fetus and it can’t just be that the brains are so useful to them or they’d be keeping us alive for breeding purposes. If they’re slash and burn farmers, they wouldn’t care about the loss of a fetus, they’d just hack her head off and move on.
Yes, red-brain guy did object, but that’s clearly not a case of getting the same stuff they did plus keeping his personality, because he can’t even stand up for a little bit in his new body and is really clumsy. It looks much more like the connection/infodump addition didn’t work, so he’s still in the same boat as the rest of the humans in not understanding what’s happening.
They just look very scary and alien to us, because they’re all squids and have this black goo for blood and seem to communicate using light, and their actions aren’t things we’re familiar with. But imagine how we must look when people catch birds – you’re just flying along and then YOU’RE TANGLED IN AN INVISIBLE FORCE FIELD AND THERE ARE MONSTERS SUDDENLY WHERE DID THEY COME FROM AND YOU’RE TRYING TO GET LOOSE BUT THE FORCE FIELD WON’T LET YOU GO AND THEY’RE THERE AND THE FORCE FIELD VANISHES AS THEY GRAB YOU AND THEN SUDDENLY YOU’RE IN THE DARK zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
Or the golden frog. There you are, sitting on your rocks, and GIANT MONSTERS COME FOR YOU AND THROW YOU IN WEIRD CONTAINERS AND TAKE YOU OUT TO COVER YOU IN GOO AND MAKE EVERYTHING HOT WHY ARE THEY DOING THIS???????????????????????????
This all could’ve been avoided, incidentally, if the movie had done things the other way around – shown the aliens discarding the heads and taking the bodies to jam alien brains in, and the main character guy rescues his babymama by hacking open the head of one of the larger ones and jumping inside. “Me” lives in my brain. Throw that out, you’re not interested in saving me, throw out everything else and you clearly are. And while the idea was presumably the aliens were overwriting our brains and just wanted the physical structure, that’s really convoluted and the only reason to assume it is if you just go on the fact scary aliens must be evil.
In conclusion, let’s not assume the worst when aliens show up on earth and start sucking us into their giant spaceships. Maybe they’re here to help!
(Dad’s theory is the light’s brainwashing powers work on some viewers and I am now a vanguard of the brain-eater invasion.)
From the way I understand your review, this is an assimilation plot. These seem like aliens that don’t care about rights in the slightest. The best case scenario is that the care about humans as sapience entities, but don’t really know anything about them.
Communication should not be an issue for aliens. If you can travel across space to alien worlds, you should be able to figure out how to communicate with aliens. If you can figure out how to use brains from alien worlds as something more than a doorstop, you should be able to to figure out how to communicate with them. If you can construct two story buildings, than you should be able to figure some common mathematical base.
Benevolent aliens should not be silent. The aliens in Independence Day had no need to communicate with those who that planned to destroy. This alien pattern seems to be lazily based on those aliens. Even the Borg had their standardized message.
I really wished Sci Fi stories put more thought into their aliens. Signs had pretty purposeless aliens too.
But you assume they have all the time in the world to chat with us.
Let’s say the sun is exploding in a week. They have a week to get us off the planet. It seems to have taken them three days just to cross North America! Even if they could manage to work out our languages fast enough (they don’t even seem to use sound to communicate!) could they convince everyone they weren’t just planning to eat our brains in a week? I’m pretty sure the first thing you’d find out about us learning our language is that we wouldn’t trust aliens.
Or imagine we came upon the planet of the squid people. The squid people are just as intelligent as us, but they’re low on the planet’s food chain and those who make it to adulthood die when they reproduce at age two of completely preventable causes. Also, they are all currently at war with each other, too. It is a planet of sapient babies constantly dying! How long are we supposed to spend trying to convince them we’re here to help when we could just help them?! BABIES DYING!!!!!!
And were they really silent? The light that made people walk out of buildings appeared to actually be communication, since the people who were dragged back said it made them feel powerful. Perhaps that was their attempt to say “Hello new friends! Please come to pick up your new, better bodies that won’t die on you like yours do all the time!”
Besides, we don’t always communicate when we’re trying to help. We know things like alarm calls, but if we want to help out animals that are in danger, we usually just tranquilize them and move them. If the aliens view us as their equals, you’d expect them to try to talk, but if they view us as we view monkeys, they’re going to drug us because they know we need to get in the crate and away from the coming disaster.
Is there anything in the narrative about an oncoming natural disaster? That’s giving them a lot of credit when the writing isn’t showing any of that. There was actually a movie that actually had aliens saving us from a sun disaster, but that actually came up in the movie(I don’t remember the title but it had to do with mutating humans with music or something.
They probably had a lot high timescale to plan something than a week. Whatever aliens make a trip to Earth will have a highly efficient plan for what they want to do. If you want to save a species from dying, you would start in war torn places, or target the near terminal. They surely will have a better way to communicate than a drug light unless they are truly winging it.
I haven’t watch the movie, but everything about these aliens seem like a sloppy mismatch of Sci Fi invaders.
but everything about these aliens seem like a sloppy mismatch of Sci Fi invaders
Oh absolutely. But there being some sort of time crunch seemed most consistent with their behavior. I mean, they had lights that brainwash you into not causing a fuss, but it seemed only had enough to attack portions of the country, so they blast an area once then retrieve them to use in the next area. Given our level of technology, they could easily have just spent a while building more of those before going in, it’s not like we would have noticed them or had any way of fighting back while they were hanging out in deep space. And the fact they tried to get everyone speaks to actual concern rather than us being a resource – most of their energy is spent trying to mop up the last handful of humans in LA – from an expenditure for gains standpoint, they should’ve just sucked up the humans from the initial brainwash, which seemed to be almost all the people in the city and left. But that’s absolutely how people trying to catch feral cats act – the last one is a thousand times harder than the first, but you can’t leave the poor kitty!
It’s quite a misplaced altruism to suck up brains of an unsuspecting race. It’s still the most probable explanation of this behind their behavior. Even so, it’s quite a violation of our rights. I can understand why they are doing it, but I’m still unsympathetic.
Also, everything I heard about the movie is that it’s quite horrible, but you don’t even examine the human characters that closely. Are you generally interested in alien invasion/first contact plots?
Well, sure, from our point of view, because we think we’re smart and deserve to be consulted. But we don’t consult lots of other animals, so if they think of us the way we think of pet cats…
I wasn’t paying attention to the humans because it’s a plotless crappy movie. The movie opens with the lights, then flashes back to earlier to establish the human characters and I just fast-forwarded until the aliens reappeared. I only even knew the woman was pregnant because Dad mentioned it during the fastforwarding. In other movies I’d care, but this one didn’t have much going for it.
In case you misunderstood, Farla is not suggesting that this brilliant little tale is actually what the writers of Skyline intended to convey. She’s suggesting that it’s the only sensible interpretation of the movie and really delightful despite being completely unintended.
Signs had pretty purposeless aliens too.
Oh, and my family had a theory for that one. Those aren’t the aliens in the space ship. They’re the pet dogs. It’s been a long car ride and you have to let your pets out for a break occasionally.
[ let’s not assume the worst when aliens show up on earth and start sucking us into their giant spaceships.]
IT’S A COOKBOOK
On a constructive note, a quick googling for more info about the movie turned up a reviewer who drew a lot of similar conclusions to you:
http://www.denofgeek.us/movies/16640/skyline-what-went-wrong-and-whats-with-the-ending
I guess the best thing that could be said for the movie is that not giving the aliens a coherent explanation makes them more alien and lets people come up with better theories.
I read somewhere that the creator of “neon genesis evangelion” flat out said that there was no deep meaning to the show. It was just aliens attacking for the sake of having a show. Fans did create many theories, but the series revolved about the budget and getting episodes out.
Far to many shows take the “mystery” path without any planning, and in my opinion, that’s just lazy writing. Lost is probably the most well known series for doing this. Never actually explaining stuff just creates a thin illusion of deepness.
A good alien invasion might have us questioning the morality or humans vs aliens, but not “does this even make sense?”
That’s also where the movie format helps, though. NGE has the problem of going on long enough that inconsistencies pop up and you can’t make sense of the plot. Lost had the problem of both being long AND being all about presenting you with things that didn’t make sense with the promise there would be an actual answer later.This was short and they barely gave any explanation for the monsters, so it’s easy to find one of your own without running into a contradiction.