Skyline

Alien invasion, giant rampaging monsters, spaceships battling fighter planes, giant explosions and the destruction of Los Angeles. Sounds like a great night out, doesn't it? I wouldn't be writing about films unless I felt I have some clue how they work, but how Skyline has managed to take these great ingredients and turn out so mind-numbing tedious is quite beyond me. It's the all-action blockbuster equivalent of a sleeping pill.

Eric Balfour is Jarrod, visiting Los Angeles with pregnant girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) to see his old friend Terry (Donald Faison). Don't worry if you forget the names; as soon as the film is over you'll forget the characters too. We never really learn anything about the former two but we are told that Terry is rich, which means he's surrounded by scantily clad women and likes to throw parties. In the morning our heroes wake up and put their hands over their eyes as the world seems unreasonably bright. It's a common enough experience the morning after, but this time they'd be better off if they just hid under the covers or held on tighter to the floor. It's only 4:30 in the morning, and that light isn't dawn - it's an alien snare meant to draw in human prey.

I'm sure this all looked very clever on the drawing board, at least to people who hadn't seen it before in 2008 Vikings versus aliens romp Outlander (and there's a film I never thought I'd be praising for its superior craft). In reality, though, it sets up the type of claustrophobic scenario that depends on strong characters and tight writing. Having neither, Skyline ditches it at the first opportunity and looks around for another invasion movie gimmick.

So we see the giant hovering spaceships (which might have looked cool in Independence Day, but that was a long time ago), and we see monsters ripped off from Cloverfield but used still more ham-fistedly than in that film's clumsy final scenes. This film has neither the ballsy bravado nor the tongue-in-cheek wit of its sources, and it's certainly not good enough to get away with a clumsy rip-off of the transformation experience from District 9.

What we're left with is a hodge-podge of stolen ideas tacked onto the pointless story of the world's stupidest, worst-equipped group of would-be survivors ever, yet somehow it doesn't even manage to be funny. All they really do is sit in the hotel room or run around outside, screw things up and panic a lot. There's assorted macho posturing as the men fret over the need to protect the women, whilst the women, despite seeming brighter, do nothing but whimper.

A sort of inbuilt slasher-style morality means that sins like sexual indiscretion or blondeness are promptly punished. Every time the writers run out of ideas, they throw in another monster. Here comes the tentacle room-invasion scene from War Of The Worlds; there goes the roof door scene from The Hangover. Wait, wasn't that monster there in Hellboy? Poor thing, to have fallen on such hard times.

You might think that with monsters and explosions you can't go wrong. Skyline proves otherwise. As the ending reveals, this is a miniature-painting adolescent role-player fantasy tacked together with sub-Telenovela dramatics. The most monstrous thing about it is the fact it found a distributor.