The Darkest Hour in 3D Movie Review
Is finding a non-moronic reason for aliens to invade the Earth really such a challenge for Hollywood?
This may sound weird, but in my opinion the best reason to invade a movie has come up with in 2011 has got to be Skyline. Stealing human brains to operate the biomechanical constructs makes sense to me. It is a resource you can only get here. The Darkest Hour suffers from the same problem that plagued Battle LA: the aliens are here to steal resources that are easily available any number of other places in the universe that don’t have the pesky natives fighting back all the time.
I don’t know. I guess this premise was slightly more plausible than stealing water, but even so if you are even going to give us a reason spend a little more time thinking about the mechanics of it. Any race capable of traveling light years to Earth should not have a huge problem with asteroid mining and so on.
Anyway, that is my true geek issue with this movie. There are other, more general reasons but that is mine. The movie starts out with two young software engineers (Emile Hirsch-Into the Wild, Milk, Speed Racer, the Girl Next Door and Max Minghella-the Ides of March, Social Network, Agora) flying to Moscow to pitch some kind of social media service to some ill defined Russian group (government? Corporation? Russian mafia?) only to find they are being totally ripped off by their Swedish former business partner (Joel Kinnaman-the Killing, Easy Money). They decide to blow off steam the way any rational human would-by getting hammered and hopefully laid at a sleazy Russian nightclub. There they meet two girls from America and Britain (heartbreaker Olivia Thirlby-Juno, No Strings Attached, the Wackness(?) and hot blonde Rachel Taylor-Transformers, Bottle Shock, Shutter) and talk the night away. Then, sparkly Christmas tree lights land and go invisible. They kill everyone they come into contact with in a very PG-13 friendly instant dissolve. They are invisible but activate light bulbs whenever they get near so you can sort of see them coming, at least in urban areas.
The kids hide in a storage room for a few days, and then have to trek across Moscow. People get dissolved. They discover the only really interesting character in the movie, a Russian electrician (Dato Bakhtadze-Crash, Wanted) who invents a microwave gun that can disrupt the alien shields. Then he gets killed. The group in joined by yet another hot young person (Veronika Ozerova-no other credits) who adds nothing nothing to the group except a sexy Russian accent (“Boris! We have to get moose and squirrel!”). For some reason I hope she does well, if only because this is her first film and she is pretty cute. Anyway, more stuff happens. Toward the end of the film the writers started channeling Independence Day. I mean, they figure out how to make the aliens visible and vulnerable to regular guns, and that is supposedly enough of a fighting edge to let the humans actively resist. They still don’t really address the fact that until the aliens get shot by the gun they are mostly invisible, a tactical advantage on the order of bringing a gun to a knife fight. If you see the movie you will see what I mean. After an hour and a half of plodding but in tone sci fi movie progression in the last ten minute the plot takes a left turn into Cheesy Valley and founds a township there.
Anyway, the stars. Sci fi movie. One star. 
The aliens, when you finally see them, are pretty cool looking although highly derivative (cough cough ripped off cough cough) of Alien (Alien image courtesy of the Sci Fi T-Shirt category). One star. Olivia Thirlby was driving me crazy throughout the movie. If anyone were to ask me what type of girl gets me the most, it’s hers. One star. In spite of some other issues that will come up later in the black hole region, I thought the actors all did an admirable job with the material they were given. One star. Some interesting scientific concepts used here. None of them really possible given the actual laws of thermodynamics, but interesting nevertheless. One star. You don’t see a lot of movies filmed in Moscow that aren’t spy films. One star. Overall pacing was good. One star. Total: seven stars.
The black holes. Cheesy ending. One black hole. Stupid reason for the aliens to invade. One black hole. A complete lack of character development from anyone. There was a little bit before the start of the invasion, but it actually made me dislike the characters more than like them. They were all painfully flat and one dimensional. I felt no real connection with any of them and therefore did not really care when they died. One black hole. Somehow a movie featuring invisible aliens did very little to terrify me. It’s like when you see a campy movie where the guy is boxing someone invisible (Cave Dwellers starring Miles O’Keefe, for example). You just can’t really take it seriously, and you suspect the scene is there to spare the movie makers the cost of hiring another villain, or in this case spending more on complicated CGI. In this sci fi horror film I felt little to no horror. Two black holes. This script was a blatant tool to get young hotties on the screen. It’s OK to have someone older than 25 on a screen once in a while. Sometimes their wisdom and experience can offset the brashness of the younger people, and by contrast actually make the young hotties even more hot (let’s just say I was feeling my age watching this, and a movie should not alienate (haw!) parts of the audience if they want to build any kind of loyalty). The one old guy died within 10 minutes of appearing, and in truth he was the most interesting character. One black hole. Remember all that lack of character development I was just bitching about? Well, the movie felt kind of short overall. I know I have been spoiled with good, long films lately but 89 minutes felt kind of short. Seems they could have padded it out with something more on the characters. One black hole. A few glaring plot holes. One black hole. I have kind of stopped bitching about poor 3D and the headache I get watching it, but a weird thing happened in this movie. It was filmed in Moscow, which should make for some cool visuals camera work. However, the 3D managed to make all that look like they filmed the whole thing on a sound stage with green screen and painted on backdrops. I don’t think it added much to the film, and in fact hurt it. One black hole. Total: nine black holes.
So a grand total of two black holes. Not nosebleed inducingly bad. You can enjoy it if you just want to see stuff get wrecked and can stomach a lot of cheese. Also, if you saw Skyline and Battle LA this year you might as well complete the mediocre alien invasion triumvirate. Personally I think there is a lot of other stuff out there that is better. The new Mission Impossible and Sherlock Holmes are both hard to not like. Date movie? Probably not. I don’t see any girl really being into this film unless she is a total geek. Pick your battles. This one is not worth the effort to drag her to the show.
Thanks for reading. Follow me on Twitter @NerdKungFu. Lots more movies coming out, so more to see soon. I have a busy schedule this weekend (Party!) but will try to squeeze in a couple more. Talk to you all soon.
Dave
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