It’s a simple, stark metaphor for wealth inequality, but Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia complicates it with brutal rules and clever wrinkles, then with character choices, as the inmates start arguing about how to respond to the system, and each chooses their own path. Once a day, a magnificent banquet descends down the shaft on a floating platform - but the prisoners in the topmost cells eat everything they can, leaving a picked-over mess (or nothing at all) for those below them. In an eerie near-future, prisoners are kept in a facility consisting of bare concrete rooms, all connected by an open vertical shaft. It’s honestly shocking that Galder Gaztelu-Urrutia’s terrifying movie The Platform is his debut feature: It’s polished and confident in a way that suggests a lifetime of filmmaking, and it’s deeply weird in a way that suggests a director with the cachet to get any “one for me” movie below a certain price point funded. Violent and brazen with full-bodied alien action (whatever the opposite of Alien’s hide-the-creatures-in-the-shadows scariness is, this is it), Beyond Skyline orchestrates mayhem like the best direct-to-DVD schlockfests, hands Grillo the conductor baton, then gives The Raid’s Iko Uwais just enough extraterrestrial-smashing solos to qualify as a romp. B-movie bruiser Frank Grillo ( Captain America: The Winter Soldier) stars in the playfully vicious continuation Beyond Skyline, which finds his LAPD detective rescuing his son from abduction, then rescuing his son from inside the hull of a brain-extracting vessel, then rescuing a hybrid alien-human baby from a battalion of slobbering aliens, then helping a band of Laotian freedom fighters rescue humanity from the final wave of the invasion. and yet, here we are, ecstatically recommending it. So no one would fault you for overlooking the unsolicited sequel. 2010’s Skyline was nothing to phone home about, an alien-invasion epic with the heart of a DIY special effects reel.
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