Picture it: you’re in a dark room. You’re a little hungover from a big party for your best friend’s birthday when all of a sudden the room starts shaking and a blue light enters the room. Anyone who looks at the blue light vanishes within about thirty seconds of staring at it. And by the time you can figure out where the blue light is coming from, you’ve bickered with everyone who survived last night’s party, been attacked by hordes of antigravity-capable alien monsters who seem to have a thing for brains and are largely invincible to most anything you can do, including pulling their own brains out with a fire axe, bickered with the guy who runs the parking garage, and by the time three days have passed, you’re on an alien spaceship bound for who knows where, and your own brain has been pulled out of your head and deposited in a huge alien troglodyte with massive strength and no capability to resist.

This horrendously disjointed view of life is, in one paragraph, mostly the entire film Skyline, and you can see now why I called it dissatisfying.

Folks, when you can distill an entire movie down to one paragraph, because there’s so little exposition going on that there’s nothing to describe, and even a description of the plot turns into spoilers, you can’t call it much of anything except dissatisfying.

Lots of people are comparing this to Independence Day, and with good reason–both revolve heavily around big aliens coming down to attack humanity. The difference between the two is, at least with Independence Day, we knew WHY they were invading by about the midpoint of the movie. With Skyline, they won’t even give you a hint until the last five minutes, and even then, you have to make a host of inferences.

If you’re going make me guess half the plot myself, then I want half my ticket price back.

Watching Skyline is like reading an essay written by a particularly bright fourth grader who still hasn’t master “cohesion” yet, thus his prose is approximately: “And then this happened. Then this happened. Then some other stuff happened. And the aliens showed up. And this happened, and something else.” It’s stilted, disjointed, incoherent and wildly out of place.

Thankfully, the effects are good, and the action scenes both exciting and plentiful, which is great because you’ll need something to distract you from asking embarrassing (to the writers and directors, there are multiple instances of each, frighteningly enough) questions like “Why are these aliens here?”, or “What do they want?” or “What’s the deal with the blue light, anyway?” because Skyline sure as hell isn’t going to answer these questions with any kind of effectiveness itself.

So if you’re game to see a good old fashioned alien smackdown, and you really could care less about motive and exposition, well, you’ll do all right here.

The thoroughly disgusted Screenhead Ten Scale hands Skyline a two out of ten for being mostly garbage with a few bright points mixed in. A good script can make up for cheap effects, but a bad script will never be saved by good effects.