The Darkest Hour

After decades of alien attacks set in cities such as Los Angeles, New York and Tokyo, you would think that a Sci-Fi film set in Moscow would be a welcome and refreshing change. It was. Well, the idea was… until I actually watched the film.

The Darkest Hour, directed by Chris Gorak (Right at Your Door) follows two young entrepreneurs, Sean and Ben (Emile Hirsch and Max Minghella), who travel to Russia to flog their social networking software to a business. When they arrive, however, they find that a treacherous Swedish businessman, Skyler (Joel Kinnaman) has stolen their idea and gone ahead on the pitch without them. To make matters infinitely worse, aliens have decided to invade Earth with the Kremlin marked on their list of ‘100-things-to-destroy-before-you die’. So, predictably, the protagonists must attempt to survive to the end of the film, if they ever hope to secure a potential sequel. On their mission of endurance, they are accompanied by sly Skyler the Swede and two young females, Natalie and Anne (Olivia Thirlby and Rachael Taylor) who were sightseeing in Moscow before it was reduced to smoulders.

Apart from a few flimsy strands of weak backstory, there’s really no character development prior to the invasion. This means that, from the onset, there is no direct connection or empathy for any of the characters on screen. This continues through Darkest Hour; the one-dimensional character’s personalities are rarely explored and they lack emotional depth, which is surprising considering the film is about apocalyptic survival. The plot itself also is interesting at first but, as time goes on, proves to be thin and really quite bizarre. It is held together by equally lacklustre cliché-filled dialogue sprinkled with one-liners that the scriptwriter obviously thought were hilariously witty at the time of writing. A great example of this is when evil Skyler steals Sam and Ben’s idea and quips ‘You should have made me sign an NDA’ to which Sean retorts ‘You Mean a Non-Douchebag Agreement?’. Smooth. This will be quite worrying for some when it is considered that the scriptwriter is none other than Jon Spaihts, who is also writer on Ridley Scott’s Alien reboot, Prometheus. Surely then, being a Sci-Fi film, if the plot or dialogue is no good, the special effects will be its redeeming feature which the director invested all his time into?

Not quite. The characters feel more like guinea pigs than people, put in this world by Gorak purely to show off the special effects and the concept of the aliens which, judging by the film is a lot better on paper than on screen. Simply put, the aliens are invisible and have come to earth to harness our electricity. Electric products seem to have some kind of reaction when the aliens are nearby which undoubtedly leads to some visually engaging scenes involving lightbulbs lighting up when the aliens are near but this really doesn’t take your mind off the fact that most of the time it just means that the aliens are just… well…. invisible. The fact that you can’t see them makes you feel both that the production team have been lazy and copped out on actually designing the aliens (confirmed when you do finally get the chance to have a glimpse at them) and it’s hard to feel scared or threatened by something which visually isn’t there. Despite this, there are some great arty fly over shots of a destroyed Moscow, and shots such as an empty Red Square are astonishing, but it really is not enough to make up for the rest of the film.

At its core, the Darkest Hour has an interesting concept struggling to break free. The poor execution of this film means that the plot and dialogue are as invisible as the aliens. In fact, that’s the kind of line you would expect in this hour and a half of atrocious dialogue. I think it’s fitting to end with my favourite line in the film which clearly and cogently summed up the thoughts of the cast and crew as they made this film:
‘Every culture has alcohol and religion. That’s why I drink religiously!’

1*