Unstoppable/Skyline November 14 2010

I love the fall season around Thanksgiving. It means all the good fall/winter movies will start coming out. Too many at once unfortunately but I get to catch a few. So glad my kids are older so that I don't have to wait for everything to come out on video. The first two I went to see were PG13 and action-based so my son came with me to see them anyways so it didn't really matter.

Today I saw the movie Unstoppable. The plot is pretty simple. Runaway train. It's pretty straight forward with very little extraneous material. Denzel Washington and Chris Pine star. They are both very charismatic performers and get the viewer invested in their characters with very little effort. The movie gets going very quickly and doesn't really let up. Glad I got the big bucket of popcorn because this really is a popcorn movie. The action is almost nonstop and very suspenseful! The plot is pretty unrealistic but hey, they don't talk about the suspension of disbelief for nothing! Elijah, Sharon, and I really enjoyed this one and would definitely put it on our must see list.


The other movie I was was Skyline. This one wasn't quite as successful. The movie deals with a group of visitors trapped in a high rise apartment building when alien visitors attack the Earth. Despite some really horrendous reviews, I actually liked most of this movie. Of course this will come as no surprise to anyone since I love these kind of "end of the world" movies. But it hooked me and kept me curious as to what was going to happen next. On a reported budget of $10-20 million dollars the special effects are really quite good. I liked the lead actor Eric Balfour very much and he created his character of a young guy caught in turmoil pretty well. He was in turns heroic and vulnerable. I didn't really care for most of the other characters. Through most of this movie I thought it was worthy of a DVD purchase. Then came the ending. I won't hint as to where the movie goes but it really is bizarre and doesn't seem to fit the rest of the movie. It really is so bad though that it is no longer on my purchase list.

For an early movie Skyline was really crowded! The overall feeling was that most people liked it but I did hear a couple say the ending killed it for them. Oh, well, 2 movies down and tons to go. Yay, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is next!

Take care

Roger