The Darkest Hour Review

Plot Summary:
Five young people (Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella, Olivia Thirlby, Rachael Taylor, and Joel Kinnaman) become stranded in Moscow shortly after invisible aliens have invaded. These people eventually learn the aliens' weakness and try to fight back their freedom.

The Positives:
While this is not a good film by any means, there are some slight positive aspects to it. I honestly felt they handled Moscow as a setting very well. Before the invasion, you see all of the common sights of Moscow: the State Historical Museum, the Red Army Theatre, Saint Basil's Cathedral, etc. I felt that showing these sights gave Moscow the attraction it wants from tourists. After the invasion occurs, all of these buildings are destroyed and could have been set up well for strong action sequences. I think the cinematographer did his job well here, making Moscow look like an exciting place for an alien invasion.

I can admit some of the acting was a little weak here, but I feel Emile Hirsch at least tried to pull the movie together. He has proved to be a strong actor over the years and while this is far from his best performance, he makes a decent performance out of what he's got.

The Negatives:
Like I mentioned earlier, when Moscow is in ruins, it looks like a place to plan cool action sequences at. However, all of the action sequences are terribly done in this film. They felt too fast paced for me, I felt that the action only happened for a couple minutes and suddenly stopped. Also, the suspense of the action sequences are poorly done as well. When the audience is supposed to "feel" scared of these invisible aliens, I felt they made it painfully obvious that they were there. I felt almost that they did not even try to scare the audience in this case. If that's so, they succeeded.

Also as I mentioned earlier, with the exception of Emile Hirsch, the acting is simply atrocious. Each of the actors had no emotion whatsoever, especially when a human/animal dies. I felt the entire time that none of the actors were passionate about their roles at all and just said their lines hoping to make a quick buck out of this film.

The writing is wicked terrible here as well. While an invisible alien invasion movie is a cool concept, they failed to make it at least scary. Instead they took the more unintentional comedy route here by having cliche dialogue, an extremely predictable plot and annoying characters. My biggest criticism with the script is how annoying and one dimensional each of these characters are. I did not care for any of the characters in this film and rooted for the aliens instead.

The direction here is awful. This could have been a cool and unique alien invasion film in the hands of an experienced horror director or science fiction director. But instead, they hired a very inexperienced director to handle this film. I almost feel sorry that this is his debut film. I cannot 100% blame him for this since he got an awful script, but he could have worked around it. I hope he does better in the future.

Conclusion:
The Darkest Hour is truly a horrible film. While the cinematography of Moscow is worth checking out, I'd still say to save your money to visit Moscow than to see this garbage. Poor directing, terrible writing and atrocious acting make this potentially cool concept a pure waste of time. If I saw this movie before making my worst of 2011 list, this would easily be on it.

Rating: 2 out of 10