The Darkest Hour Reviews (2011)

• Add

The Darkest Hour is a warmed over sci-fi horror film filled with actors that had once-promising careers. Emile Hirsch received much acclaim for his work in Sean Penn's award-winning adaptation of Into the Wild; Olivia Thirlby has had a good buzz going since her days appearing in the likes of Juno and the TV series Bored to Death; and Max Minghella played a crucial role as the ally of the Winklevoss twins in David Fincher's The Social Network. And now here are these three promising young actors running around Moscow from invisible, murderous aliens who use microwaves or something. If there is any justice in the world, The Darkest Hour will represent a minor blip on these actors' respective radars, and not a career-detouring disaster. Then again, that's a pretty big if.

These aforementioned actors, alongside Australian actress Rachael Taylor, are tourists in Moscow during a particularly unfortunate period. During a night of drunken clubbing, all power in the city suddenly shuts down, and wispy lights begin descending into the city. Turns out, these are aliens, and like all aliens who visit our planet in movies, they want to kill us all and take all our resources. Our brave English-speaking heroes hide out inside the club's food storage room for a few days, then decide to take to the streets looking for survivors or a way out of the city.

You already know where this is headed. The lead actors, who play the most level-headed among the group, find themselves constantly trying to herd the more reactionary members along, including Taylor's perpetually unwilling-to-listen party girl, and a constantly freaked-out Swede (Joel Kinnaman) who is marked as the film's equivalent of Paul Reiser in Aliens pretty much from the get-go. People die, more survivors are discovered, some of them die too, then some kind of climactic battle, then end.

Two hours and a few cool-looking ashen deaths later, you may or may not remember any of what you've just watched. What you do recall will likely come from the earlier portions of the film, in which quite a few people die unceremoniously at the hands of the invading force. This being a PG-13 film, the deaths are bloodless, reducing victims to piles of dust as they are sucked into the invisible, microwaved vortex these aliens inhabit. Still, a couple of early sequences display some nice directorial touch in setting up exactly how kill-crazy these aliens are. After that, the heroes mostly spend their time wandering around a now near-deserted Moscow in scenes that evoke the kind of eerie emptiness of 28 Days Later, without ever being quite as effectively creepy.

It's all downhill from there. Once other survivors are found (including a plucky young Russian girl, and a kooky science nut who just happens to have the technology needed to beat these suckers), the movie morphs into a kind of low-rent version of Independence Day, with the remaining survivors hooking up with a few Russian military types and trying to escape the city. The script treats this uprising like we're supposed to get all excited about humanity rising up, but it has neither taken the time to establish these survivors as people we actually care about, nor made these aliens villainous enough to really hate. Despite being mass murderers, these aliens make for incredibly dull bad guys. Maybe it's because they're mostly invisible, but once we actually do see what they look like, the image of them bringing down our society is so laughably stupid that you almost wonder if we don't just deserve to be taken over.

As I said before, there are good actors in this movie, but none of them are acting. Hirsch plays the whole movie with an irritating cockiness that never improves, and Thirlby is mostly just a level-headed blank slate. Minghella has nothing to do except be the "smart one," and everyone else hams it up to such a ridiculous degree that it's impossible to not wish death upon them, let alone tolerate their continued existence. The addition of the Russian bad-asses to the crew (who, again, just happen to speak fluent English) adds a bit of comedy to the mix, as the bizarre homemade weaponry and armor made from whatever metal junk they had lying around makes them look like Spetznaz Ghostbusters. That said, I don't think hilarity was the overall intent here.

There have been a good many alien invasion films in 2011. The Darkest Hour is by far the worst. Its alien invaders are unimaginative and dumb, and its heroes are even more so. It's a mash-up of other, better films with all the flavor microwaved out of it. If you really need an alien invasion fix during this winter break, rent Attack the Block, or maybe Super 8. Hell, even Battle: Los Angeles or Cowboys & Aliens would be more satisfying than this dreck. And that's saying something.