If you haven't already thought about what you'll do when the aliens show up and blow it all to hell, thanks in advance for making me step over your burning corpse, jerk.

It's one thing to plan for zombies or real life Waterworld or whatever. Make sure you've got your samurai sword or your water-wings and you're basically set. Aliens are an altogether different bowl of apocalypse chips. We won't know what they're after. How do you kill them? Will bullets work, or will we have to get creative with the cold and/or Apple virus?

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

So I give the new alien invasion flick Skyline credit for taking its time in revealing the aliens' motivations. I deduct double points because they may have held out on the explanation for other reasons — like they spent less time thinking about how these aliens work than I'm about to spend booing them.

Eric Balfour and girlfriend Scottie Thompson head to LA to visit Balfour's old friend, Hollywood player Donald Faison. They wake from a night of partying to find the city under invasion by a massive alien fleet.

The enemy's overpowering and hunts down anyone who steps outside. Balfour and his friends must decide between waiting for a rescue that may never come or making a run for Faison's boat and the open sea.

But mostly they timidly peek out the windows of Faison's highrise apartment while displaying all the survival skills of a lemming who used to do all right through Wellbutrin but it's not really working anymore and, well, those cliffs are starting to look pretty good. Right. So I have this new theory, partly from recently rewatching Tremors, but mostly from watching this, that the enjoyability of a sci-fi/horror movie is directly correlated to the characters' problem-solving ability. The characters in Skyline couldn't figure out which end of themselves the food goes in.

For the first 40-odd minutes, it doesn't show any major cracks. Sure, the dialogue's bland, the characters are undistinguished, and Thompson's acting is so bad you would almost think that sometimes Hollywood casts women just because they're pretty. But then the aliens show up, and they're kind of cool looking, and there's a little atmosphere going on, and who knows, maybe this'll be good.

It isn't. I personally guarantee Skyline was pitched as "Cloverfield meets District 9" (guarantee will not be honored). Too bad the Brothers Strause don't have the directing chops to pull off the immediacy of Cloverfield's half-glimpsed street battles and the writing team has no idea what to do with its "Uh oh I might be turning into an alien"-style body horror. Also no one has anything resembling a sense of humor.

So instead of fun stuff that makes sense, we get the high drama of Balfour and Thompson arguing in cliches about their relationship. And aliens that can't be stopped by bazookas, exploding apartments, or nukes, but which can be beaten to death by the bare fists of a really pissed off, alien-contaminated Balfour.

Skyline's main problem, though, is its characters have no semblance of a plan. "We should...get on a boat! Shit, that didn't work. Let's hide in an apartment some more, while our squabbles about what we should do next provide almost no drama." You know what? The aliens are right to kill you all. You didn't even fill up the bathtub with drinking water, Eric Balfour.

Other than the monsters, Skyline does have one big point in its favor: an ending so crazy that even crazy-ending-having movies like Knowing and I Know Who Killed Me are whispering about how maybe it's time to call someone. I wish I could talk about it more, but if you make it that far, you deserve to experience it unspoiled.

Grade: D