Skyline

While visiting a rather successful old friend (Donald Faison) in Los Angeles, Jarrod (Eric Balfour) and his girlfriend Elaine (Scottie Thompson) find that the entire city is being besieged by aliens who clearly are bent on killing every human possible.

This is a small budget film, although it certainly doesn't look like it. The amount and quality of special effects the moviemakers squeezed out of $10 million is amazing. Your first clue, however, is that the actors are "the-guy-from." You know, the guy from 24. The guy from Scrubs. And no other name actor in the cast.

And, in effect, this is a bottle show. The action never leaves their apartment building, if you include the garage.

I found the action rather boring although there are one or two spectacular scenes that make you wonder how they did it. I didn't particularly care for the characters. However, I must admit that it was interesting seeing Eric Balfour's Jarrod, who is not willing to make a decision throughout the first four-fifths of the movie, spring into action once he committed himself. Jarrod was following everyone else's decisions -- his buddy's, his girlfriend's, even some stranger they met in the building -- until that moment. That was a nice moment for Balfour.

The ending is just bizarre. I can justify it by saying that there is no way to properly end a movie when the enemy is clearly winning and the Earth's population is going to lose (even though Battle: Los Angeles found a way to do it, even though that was somewhat pieced together), so the director (?) or screenwriter (?) came up with something weird to end the piece.

Those who demand to see every sci fi film out there (paint me among them) or just like weird endings so they can talk about them might see this movie. Everyone else should skip it.

Thumb's down.