Sci-Fa not Sci-Fi: science farce not science fiction. Final score: Latex 10, Literacy 0. Graphic designers Colin and Greg Strausse (Avatar, Iron Man2, 2012 etc) should have stuck to their day job. As directors, well where should one start? Everything in this movie is derivative and deeply inferior to the sources ripped off: Independence Day, War of the Worlds, Godzilla, Alien, District 9 etc etc. And it takes a kind of perverse talent to be worse than Cruises War of the Worlds, or more schlocky than Godzilla. Even the graphics suck. Cheap and unconvincing.

All the money seems to have been spent on the hyped ad campaign. And be warned, Skyline is a good example of the currently popular con by people flogging crap movies: put footage in the trailers that arent in the film.

A bunch of totally uninteresting characters played by a cast of exclusively TV-based actors, struggle to make any sense of a narrative that appears to have been cobbled together post hoc to fit the series of very noisy, very silly, action sequences...long on latex and short on credibility.

Think aquatic nightmare and you have the visual leitmotif sussed. Im not sure whether nature has vouchsafed us a hairy, spiky octopus, but the brothers Strausse have. These octopussy, squidgy, tentacular blobs are of course totally invincible, regenerate magically however destroyed.. even nuked.. and are just as slimy, sticky and hard to grasp as anything remotely approaching an idea in this gungy mess.

Good sci-fi uses flair and imagination to take science into places it has not yet been but might be conceived to go. Crap sci-fi, sci-fa as we may say, ignores every remotely credible scientific fact or principle of the physical world and makes people, things and creatures do impossible things. Just cos you can draw it baby dont mean it looks real. Rubber is rubber, know what I mean?

The plot? Bright lighty things streak to earth like erstwhile fireworks; if you look at the light you disappear as you break out in a bad case of all-body varicose veins and your eyes look like Jimmy Mistry doing Thriller on Strictly Come Dancing. Jared and pregnant Elaine are visiting old chum, Penthouse Chav Terry with his obnoxious partner and sleep in secretary. Many sparkly lights, squelchy war games and is it a bird, is it a plane sub comic book graphics later we reach a denouement of stupefying banality that is totally predictable from the moment Jareds varicose veins first set in.

There are moments of repulsive drama in Skyline which sort of get to you but as the movie starts loud and just gets louder with a musical score which is an endless series of crescendos; in the face of this unremitting onslaught of brain sucking, plane f..cking youd have to be deaf not to have some reaction. Dumb, daft and desperate without the charm of the tacky, badly acted cheapo horror movies of the 1950s that it most resembles.

I had a feeling it was going to be like that from the moment I saw the trailer... one to miss, I think.