Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
12/31/11
My
name is Lamar Kukuk, and I love junk. Man, that is such a relief
to get off my chest! Admit it, you’ve scrolled through the pages
of this site and thought “What is that dude SMOKING?!?” But it’s
true: pit a group of plucky morons against a moderately clever alien
invasion and I almost cannot help but be entertained, at least at a certain
bare bones level (hey, I’ve got SOME taste!). How fortuitous, then,
for director Chris Gorak, writer John Spaihts and the hard-working young
actors who play the courageous imbeciles they created that I opted
to see The Darkest Hour, the Timur Bekmambetov-produced, Moscow-set
3D sci-fi extravaganza Summit slipped into a Christmas release date (possibly
hoping to minimize the number of people who got a look at it). While
there’s somewhere between little and nothing here for mainstream audiences,
fans of cheesy genre thrills should get a kick out of a very imaginative
alien menace and the extremely low collective IQ of the goofily likable
humans who try to survive it. Bottom line: The Darkest Hour
is a bigger-budget version of the kind of movie they run on the SyFy Channel
Saturday nights at 9. You know who you are.
Lifelong
friends Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella), some kind of Internet
inventors, fly into Moscow looking to take a meeting with Skyler (Joel
Kinnaman), some kind of Internet mogul, to sell their new web app that
allows cool people to find cool places in foreign cities (and presumably
not have to mix with the less-attractive rabble). Skyler screws them
over, so they head to a local hotspot their own site recommends (see, it’s
already up and being used even though Skyler just stole the idea from them,
but apparently only for the part of the Internet that’s in Russia… don’t
ask), where they hook up with model Anne (Rachael Taylor) and her pal Natalie
(Olivia Thirlby). Then the lights go out, along with the cell phones
and anything else that’s electrical. Everyone pours out into the
streets to watch what look like electrified dandelion seeds drift down
out of the sky… and start disintegrating people with a touch. Once
they reach the ground, the invaders become invisible (save the occasional
crackle that seems to have been added in post-production because test audiences
just were NOT going for the whole “invisible aliens” thing), making it
difficult for just about everyone in Moscow to avoid becoming a tiny pile
of ash. Everyone we’ve met in the movie so far flees to the club’s
basement, where they lock themselves in and proceed to go through a huge
stack of boxes of food in just four days (BAD time for nervous eating).
Rather than eat Skyler, which should have bought them at least another
six hours, Sean announces that they’ll all be heading out into the city
now to try and reach the American Embassy (Skylar suggests the Swedish
one instead, which made no sense at all until I looked Kinnaman up on IMDB
and discovered he was Swedish: at least that explains the line about
why Skyler only speaks “Some Russian”; I just assumed he was illiterate).
They find the streets abandoned and the see-through electro-charged aliens
with their protective force fields looking for more tasty snacks.
The good news: when one comes close, anything that runs on electricity
comes to life: light bulbs flash, car alarms honk, and cell phones
are even polite enough to ring (are the aliens calling?). Also, while
the aliens register body heat and hunt down anything that has it, they
can’t see through glass (unless it’s a glass window, or maybe those times
they see people through windows it’s Plexiglas or those folks have helpfully
opened those windows, stop bogging me down in the details!). When
our heroes happen upon some survivors living inside a homemade Faraday
Cage that keeps the aliens from sensing their heat signatures, they also
have a chance to get a translation on the recorded signal repeating over
and over on the radio (I don’t KNOW why the radio works, OK?!?):
turns out there’s a nuclear submarine waiting in the bay to pick up survivors,
if they can only reach it by morning.
I know
the people who made The Darkest Hour meant for it to be truly awesome,
if for no other reason than because they desperately want it to start a
trilogy. But that didn’t happen, and they have to take their satisfaction
from the fact that what they’ve come up with is the right combination of
clever and idiotic to engage people who like just that sort of junk.
And yes, I am that man (I once told actor Misha Collins how much I enjoyed
his crazy SyFy vehicle Stonehenge Apocalypse and he looked at me
quizzically and said “Really?”). And even if you don’t feel like
a movie gets an extra amount of spring in its step from being just a little
ridiculous, The Darkest Hour is close enough to a passable genre
outing that people who can never get enough Sci-Fi should still have a
good time (seriously, have I qualified myself enough yet?).
When
it’s not killing time with its cheerfully dunderheaded characters hiding
out in apartments, basements and warehouses trying to keep the budget down,
The Darkest Hour has a nice, big-budget look and some impressive
special effects. The sequence where the streets fill with people
watching the “pretty” aliens falling from the sky to kill them is quite
stunning, and the 3D effects in that scene make the invaders palpably invisible
but still possible for the audience to see. There are some nice 3D
shots, albeit not enough to justify the extra ticket cost. And when
the aliens are finally revealed, they have a clever design that leads very
well to a combination of high and low-tech solutions to killing them.
Yeah, they LOOK cheap as hell, which makes the whole invisibility thing
seem like a good fashion statement for them, but you just can’t have it
all.
I believe
I’ve mentioned that the characters are idiots, however much the script
expects us to see them as a bunch of engineering geniuses (and a model
who always runs the wrong way and forces her best friend to double back
for her) who’re the only ones capable of solving this intractable puzzle.
What I have not mentioned is that there’s a scene where the assembled brain
trust is walking across a bridge, then abruptly stops and decides they’d
better turn around… BECAUSE THERE’S A HUGE MIDDLE SECTION OF THE BRIDGE
MISSING FIVE FEET IN FRONT OF THEM. Rule of thumb: when being
pursued by invisible aliens through a post-apocalyptic cityscape, don’t
just stare at your feet, even if the two women walking through Moscow barefoot
probably were thinking of all the dusty former people they were getting
all over themselves. It broke my heart that there turns out to be
an explanation for a moment when Sean stands still next to a mannequin
in a shopping mall and the aliens pass him by (it’s the glass they’re behind),
because I really wanted the aliens to be fooled by a guy pretending to
be a statue, heat signature be damned… yeah, it’s that kind of flick.
Luckily,
the actors playing these fools do so with pluck and personality.
The 3-time SAG Award-nominated Hirsch, who must have read this script and
thought “It’s come to this?!?”, attacks Sean with a bravado that recalls
the young DiCaprio. Thirlby is plucky and good-hearted as Natalie,
while Taylor, who must be glad for once not to have to pretend she’s the
world’s most beautiful scientist, does a good job of doing the visible
mental math that always leads Anne to make the wrong choice. Minghella
is upstanding and courageous enough as Ben that you honestly can’t decide
for certain which guy will survive to that inevitable end that leaves just
one man and one woman from the opening scenes (you really don’t think the
model survives, do you?). There are some nice performances by Russian
actors in supporting roles, like debuting teen Veronika Ozerova as one
of their fellow survivors (she seems a bit old for the role, and I did
think she might be constantly rebuffing people calling her “kid” as if
to say “Dude, I’m twenty!”, but that’s not her fault) and Yuriy Kutsenko
as the leader of a band of rebels who might have had an interesting film
of their own. I actually suspect there may be a Russian cut floating
around that has larger roles for these and other local players: people
keep making odd references to things we don’t know, didn’t see and don’t
much care about that might be contained in scenes intended for the hometown
audience.
The
Darkest Hour is the kind of movie best appreciated by the giggly and
the drunk. I don’t drink, but I do get quite giggly at silly genre
flicks like this, and I had a really good time watching it. Even
the film itself seems to throw its hands in the air in the closing moments,
when an odd tag has those two survivors seeming to have come back from
summer vacation to tell us that the war with the aliens is going real super!
I know The Darkest Hour is not a good movie, but it’s a fun one,
and really, how much more can you expect from an alien invasion movie that
comes out on Christmas Day? At least it’s not Aliens
vs. Predator: Requiem! |
