The science fiction films of late haven’t managed the same pitch of brooding and speculation as classics like Blade Runner, Alien, Star Wars (not the prequels, mind you) and Solaris. Hollywood decides instead to create an amalgam of techno-veneer and blockbuster explosions. Michael Bay’s Transformers series is perhaps the most prominent perp on the science-fiction-as-excuse-for-things-that-go-boom rap sheet. There was a rapturous guiding light to a possible new hope, though, in 2009 with the festival hit District 9—the first feature film by South African director, Neill Blomkamp.
The Darkest Hour finds itself following the same tradition of style-over-substance thriller flick by way of science fiction. The movie sits somewhere on the junction between Cloverfield and Escape from New York, and it certainly felt like a B-movie just without the irreverent humor.
It’s The Happening but with electrical demons from outer space rather than a contagious virus. Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella) are entrepreneurial twenty-somethings in Moscow trying to sell their travel site to a Russian investor—Skyler (Joel Kinnaman) who also has the most irritatingly persistent deer-in-headlights stare. After being muscled out of their business deal by the greedy Muscovite, the pair head to a nightclub where they meet Natalie (Olivia Thirlby) and Anne (Rachael Taylor) who are on vacation in Moscow after using the same travel site that brought our male protagonists to the city in the first place. After a few awkward minutes of flirting and picture-taking, a city-wide blackout shakes the screen into submission until finally our alien invaders are revealed (something which cripples a movie that could have been better served by keeping its villains hidden until the end or for the entirety of the movie).
So the movie has a pretty good sense of exposition in the way it brings together (usually unrelated) sets of characters. But the characters themselves make this movie hard to watch, especially as they stumble through dialogue that was clearly written more explicitly, but was censored with the PG-13 rating. This combination of boring characters and the sorts of lines that would be present in a children’s television series zaps The Darkest Hour from being enjoyed without the aid of gimmicky action sequences. And for that matter, Emile Hirsch—who was nominated for numerous awards for his portrayal of Chris McCandless in Into the Wild—and Max Minghella (The Social Network) are two terrific actors whose abilities are overshadowed by the lack of care behind the camera and on the page.
Though the movie is awkward and laughably disjointed, the same cannot be said for the idea. There have been plenty of alien invasion movies that are gripping and entertaining without losing focus and descending into farcical nonsense; see Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) or Invasion of the Bodysnatchers (1978). The Darkest Hour does amp up the stakes with aliens that are inherently evil and dastardly as opposed to the usual misunderstood alien of E.T. (1982), and these aliens aren’t the mystical or arcane type either. They’re rigid, electrically-fed aliens who drill through Earth for its conductive metals.
But it’s difficult to defend anything on the basis of its potential v. its execution. Athletes put their hearts into the game, but if they consistently lose what good are they? 4/10
The Darkest Hour is rated PG-13 and premieres Dec. 25, 2011.
Kyle Dunn / Editor in Chief
