Movie Review: 'The Darkest Hour'

The Darkest Hour Starring Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella, Olivia Thirlby Directed by Chris Gorak Rated PG-13

Try sitting down and writing out a 500 word document about a blank concrete wall and you'll pretty much understand what I'm going through when writing this review.  The Darkest Hour is a bad movie, but that's not its biggest problem.  Its biggest problem is that it's a boring movie.  Oh, god, is it a boring movie.  It's like having to listen to a lecture by Ben Stein about how to file your taxes.

The film starts out with two American business entrepreneurs, Ben and Sean, trying to sell a GPS system to Russian investors.  The former is played by The Social Network's Max Minghella, and the latter by Emile Hirsch.  Man, Emile Hirsch, remember him in Into the Wild?  Wasn't that a great movie?  Who ever thought that Sean Penn would be able to direct so...huh?  The review?  Oh yeah, sorry.  I'm just really bored.  As I was saying, the two intend to sell their system to Russian investors, but find when they arrive that they have been cheated and plagiarized. 

It's not a problem they have to worry about for long, though, because Russia (as well as the entire world, we learn) is soon attacked by a fleet of aliens who proceed to vaporize people left and right.  What do they look like?  Well, the closest thing that can be called interesting about this movie is that the aliens spend the majority of the film invisible.  It's an idea that could either create an amazing amount of tension, or fall flat on its face.  Guess which it does in this film?

The "invisible aliens" started out as what was probably a good idea, since being able to see less of whatever the danger is often what makes it more scary.  Look at the Paranormal Activity series.  For the first scene the aliens show up, the gimmick actually works, leading to some eerie kills as we wonder just what they actually look like.  But, once it's clear that the film isn't able to develop them in a remotely interesting way, they get tiring really fast.  We learn a few basic rules about them, and then we all just get the same kind of action/suspense scenes over and over.  Just imagine if, in Alien, Ripley spent the whole movie just fighting the original facehugger form of the Xenomorph, rather then getting the unpredictability of its different forms.  Well, it would still be one hell of a lot better than this, but you get my point.  When we finally do see what the alien is, it looks laughably stupid, like a power-up from an 8-bit video game.

There are a few other characters, if you can even call them that, but none of them are even close to worth mentioning.  The Russian setting is painfully underused, giving us only a mildly different backdrop, and insulting us when the film still finds a way to make all four main characters westerners.  Because, no one can relate to characters with different accents, of course.  This is really just a movie that fails at every conceivable level.  Now, if you'll excuse me, I'm going to find something more stimulating to do, like watching paint dry.

Comments

[Jason]

The Darkest Hour Spoof.. lol check it out!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejFv687UFHg