When strange lights descend on the city of Los Angeles, people are drawn outside like moths to a flame where an extraterrestrial force threatens to swallow the entire human population off the face of the Earth. Now the band of survivors must fight for their lives as the world unravels around them.

Because they are not directors. They are visual effects people. They founded and own Hydraulx, a genuinely respected VFX house that contributed work to Avatar, Iron Man 2 and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. At some point they decided to cut out the middleman entirely and produce their own blockbuster, financing it themselves and using their own facilities and equipment.

To keep costs down, almost the entire film was shot in and around Greg Strause’s own apartment building in Marina Del Rey. He filmed it in his actual home. The screenplay was written by two Hydraulx employees. The cast was assembled largely from relatively unknown actors. The whole thing came in somewhere between ten and twenty million dollars, which for a film containing over 900 visual effects shots is genuinely impressive.

And that is the strange thing about Skyline. The effects are competent. Several critics conceded that the spectacle is the one area where it delivers, with the beams of light over the city, the ships emerging from cloud cover and the aerial assault all reasonably well staged. The Strause brothers know how to build a set piece. What they appear to have no interest in whatsoever is anybody standing underneath it.

Then there is the legal dispute, which is the genuinely entertaining part. While making Skyline, Hydraulx was simultaneously being paid by Sony Pictures to produce the visual effects for Battle: Los Angeles, another alien invasion film set in the same city, releasing a few months later. In August 2010 Sony indicated it was contemplating legal action against the Strause brothers over the overlap. The matter was formally dismissed in March 2011, after Sony concluded during discovery that none of the Battle: Los Angeles effects work had been reused. The brothers said they were glad to put it behind them.

So the single most interesting event associated with this production is an arbitration that went nowhere.

Commercially, and infuriatingly, it worked. Skyline took somewhere between sixty-eight and seventy-nine million dollars worldwide against that small budget. They won. They got away with it completely. And then they made Beyond Skyline in 2017, Skylines in 2020, and a fourth entry titled Skyline: Warpath was announced in 2024.

This was so bad that I am once again crowning a new number one for the year. Day three hundred and one, and I am still finding garbage.

1 out of 10. Do not watch it.