An Hour You'll Never Get Back

If you saw any movies at the theater about half a year ago, you probably saw a trailer for movie called The Darkest Hour. Aliens invade Moscow. They're invisible. They disintegrate humans in an instant. They're here to destroy everyone.

It looked terrible. Actually it looked good. The visual effects were impressive... but it just looked like a bad movie overall. Well, a friend just loaned it to me, so I got the chance to judge for myself, free of charge.

There probably was a good movie somewhere in the DNA of this thing, but the writer was not able to bring it out. The major flaw of the script is that it's sorely lacking in any kind of connective tissue. There are numerous examples of this:

The first ten minutes of the film are a setup for some of the major characters, including their relationships to each other, their personal backgrounds, and hints of their skill sets. None of this comes into play at any subsequent point in the film, once the invasion happens.

Characters are constantly making intuitive leaps, reaching coincidentally correct conclusions about the nature and limitations of the aliens even when several easily brainstormed theories might also be correct. They work like this; they can't do that. That must be how it is! Well actually... no. You just happen to be right. (And by the way, if you're ever writing a piece of fiction and you ever give a character the line of dialogue "that makes sense," you are shoveling crap on your reader/viewer to cover up bad storytelling. Either it does make sense, in which case your audience doesn't need to be told so, or it doesn't, and you're only trying to convince yourself it's okay to move onto the next scene.)

Characters that seem to be locked into intractable viewpoints change their opinions on a dime on just one choice sentence or two from another character. If only minds could be changed so easily in real life! (And do you think it gets any easier when post-apocalyptic life and death are on the line?)

But there are still more terrible choices in the writing. One of the worst is to regularly include POV shots from the perspectives of the aliens. Showing us exactly what they see robs tension from several scenes throughout the film, where leaving us to wonder along with the characters would have been a more suspenseful choice. Worse, there's a specific action sequence started in the middle of the film when we see one of the aliens spot three characters in a situation where we've specifically been told and shown earlier in the film would actually be impossible!

The one good thing is what you could take away from the trailer -- the movie looks great. That awesome disintegration effect never really gets old. (And good thing, because you see it a hundred times.) Also, the scope and intensity with which the apocalypse is rendered feels far grander and better than such a cheesy movie deserves. It's up there on par with some very good modern disaster movies like 28 Days Later and the remake of Dawn of the Dead. But the movie is unworthy of the effort.

I feel generous grading the movie a D-. Your darkest hour would be the one in which you choose to watch it.