Skyline

 A bunch of thinly drawn, unlikeable dimwits (Eric Balfour, Scottie Thompson, Brittany Daniel, Crystal Reed, David Zayas, and Donald Faison) converge on an LA penthouse (it's supposed to be swanky, but feels a little low-rent) to celebrate a birthday. Honestly, it's not worth differentiating them; Even the ones we're supposed to root for are poorly written and often behave like unrelatable pricks.

 Aliens invade while they sleep off the afterparty. At first it's falling swirls of blue light, then huge motherships that drop off smaller craft and big ground walkers that reminded me a little bit of those giant quadrupedal tanks in Halo. Their look borrows more than a little from the Michael Bay transformers - overcomplicated, slinky, and full of lens-flare causing blue lights - but because directors Greg and Colin Strause let us get a good look at them, and because they are supposed to be scary, I think the designs compare favorably against Bay's movies (or Battle Los Angeles, or Battleship). Even when the budget used to render them is several magnitudes smaller.

 In any case, the film follows these dipshits (and later, another one played by David Zayas that should be more likeable but soon proves otherwise) as they try to escape the building, get foiled, and then try to flag down the US army as they attack the aliens.

 There isn't a single worthwhile sci-fi idea here, and the story... well, the story literally undoes everything its protagonists achieve two thirds of the way in, and finishes with a ludicrous non-ending that pits differently coloured brains against one another (red versus blue, obviously). It's a B-movie through and through, played completely straight. I'd be up for that, if the execution were up to it, but I'd need to give a shit about the characters or at least get a lot more action. And... well, none of that happens.

 The action, surprisingly, is pretty decent, even if the camera is often a bit shaky and the effects are mostly dated (and looked cheap even back when this came out). There's also some surprises along the way - but any fun is undone by the seriousness with which the shoddy, generic character drama is treated, and its preponderance.

 More than anything else, this is clearly a low-budget effects showcase; It shouldn't surprise anyone that the Strause brothers were mainly CGI special effects artists before this. It's worth noting that both of them were working doing effects for Battle of Los Angeles (a similarly bad ground-level, LA-set alien invasion movie) when this was released. Sony took them to court over that, and later dropped the lawsuit. Oh, and they had also directed the sequel to Aliens vs. Predator, but I don't think anyone sued them over that... somehow.

 This wasn't a good movie when it came out back in 2010, and the intervening years have not improved it at all (it does happen, sometimes). However, it's become an unlikely action franchise, one that knows enough to get some key players from The Raid plus Frank Grillo, Daniel Bernhardt and even Scott Adkins for the latest, unreleased one. I did catch the first sequel and it's bonkers, good fun. We shall see if the rest of them at least maintain that level. In the meanwhile I had to rewatch the first two to have the deep lore of the franchise fresh in my mind - how else am I supposed to know which colour of brains I'm supposed to root for?