The Darkest Hour

               Since I basically took December off with the assumption that most releases were going to be Academy Awards bait, I missed out on a couple of serious stinkers.  One of these films was The Darkest Hour, a teen sci-fi alien invasion movie that was released on Christmas Day for some strange reason.

               I mean, hell, it barely broke 2 digits of ‘freshness’ over at RottenTomatoes with an 11% overall rating.  THIS sounded like the sort of movie I should do for Mainstreamin’s January return, but I still needed a new release.  Hence Contraband’s review on Sunday.

              As much as I enjoyed Contraband, I despised The Darkest Hour.  One movie had entertaining action, plot, and actors, while the other was abso-freaking-lutely ridiculous, even for a sci-fi alien invasion film.

               In fact, the only thing they had in common was Faraday.

On to the review!

According to the synopsis that’s posted on IMDB.com, the plot for this film is ‘In Moscow, five young people lead the charge against an alien race who have attacked Earth via our power supply.’

First off, how the hell do aliens attack via a power supply?  That would involve them shooting out of…what…coal plants and nuclear facilities?  No, they attacked Earth because FOR its power supply.

Secondly, the whole ‘leading the charge’ part should be changed to ‘accidentally doing something useful while freaking the hell out and running around uselessly.’

Shit, I’m half a page in and I haven’t actually said anything about this film.  Okay.  Deep breath.

In The Darkest Hour, two young, photogenic American businessmen fly to Moscow to try and sell a social phone app to a Russian company, but find out that their Swedish business partner undercut them and has already sold the app.  They later run into two attractive women and the aforementioned asshole Swedish business partner in a bar.  Then aliens attack.  The next hour is spent trying to get out of Moscow while the invisible aliens try to absorb their energy, a process that turns living bodies into ash.

There ya go, there’s the plot.  What really ticks me off with these films are how lacking in originality they tend to be.  Survivors of an alien invasion stumble upon a weapon that just might turn the tide, but must risk their own lives in the process.

The idea of the aliens being made of a different form of energy was pretty cool, but then they ruined it by later showing you what the aliens looked like, and completely shooting apart the theory while explaining how the ultimate weapon worked. 

The other part that really pisses me off is just how damn photogenic everyone is.  After the alien attack, our five survivors hole up in a restaurant storage room for 11 days.  Of course, not a single drop of grime or dirt is on any of them.  If they get dirty in one scene they’re miraculously showered in the next.  That’s ridiculous.  After 11 days in a sparse room, shitting into used tin cans, everyone is going to look and smell disgusting.  I don’t need The Road style outfits, but at least pretend that your shit stinks.

Add that to the fact that our heroes are all 8+ on the 1-10 attractiveness scale, and it’s just insufferable.  Am I really supposed to believe that a few incredibly attractive twenty-something foreigners are going to be the ONLY people who can successfully navigate Moscow and possibly help save the world?

Look, I know I may not be properly conveying how I feel about this, but the point is, I want my survival horror/action/sci-fi movies to be believable from the human standpoint.  That’s what builds tension.  I want to feel that ‘holy shit, it could actually maybe totally play out like this.’  When you throw in such photogenic leads and make no attempt to let a single local be anything other than a laughable stereotype, you’ve completely lost me.  Now I’m bored and absolutely itching to tear every aspect of your film apart.

Anyhow, the movie sucks and while I do genuinely like Emile Hirsch in some films, this is not one of them.  The other actors/actresses are pretty much attractive throwaways.  I mean, they were IN other movies.  Good ones even.  They were just forgettable as individuals.

Oh yeah, and in case you’re wondering about the Faraday comment, in Contraband the main character’s name is Farraday, and in The Darkest Hour a Faraday cage is a major plot point.  That little bit of science geekery was the only thing I really enjoyed.

If you want a ridiculous, fun sci-fi movie, go check out the underrated 80’s film Enemy Mine.  It’s absolutely nothing like The Darkest Hour and that’s why I recommend it.  Sci-fi movies aren’t what they used to be, but even that genre doesn’t deserve this crap.   I’m having a genuinely difficult time thinking up a movie I liked less than this one.  Umm….still better than Tom Cruise’s War of the Worlds, I guess.  Less hyped, at least.