Review : THE DARKEST HOUR (and a half...boom boom!)

Where to start with this colossal turd? (well...the beginning I guess) In the opening moments, as soon as the hapless Emile Hirsch opens his mouth with an attempt at wise-cracking over the "no mobile phones switched on when on a plane"situation, I hated him instantly. As he & his arsehole of a friend then arrive at Moscow airport & start musing over their fantastic enterprising internet idea that will surely make them millions & millions - I hated the pair of them equally. And as soon as we're introduced to that lassie from Juno & that Aussie one from Transformers prancing around Red Square displaying their obnoxious touristy behaviour, I hated EVERYONE I was supposed to empathise with for the films duration - bugger.

Yet even a set of loathsome characters may end up being a good thing if the film opts to put them through utter misery (casing point the Final Destination series), unfortunately though the only ones likely to suffer immensely through the Darkest Hour is the audience themselves. After 15 minutes of vile, imperialistic exposition; the aliens thankfully arrive & start killing everybody in sight - forcing our "heroes" to forget about any character arcs they've attempted to build up in the opening stages, switch into bland / personality-free "survivalist mode" and lock themselves in a kitchen cupboard alongside the routine cowardly, jerk-like figure who is obviously neither American or Russian & will inevitability perish in the later stages.

And then the boredom, OH THE BOREDOM! The following hour attempts to evoke the apocalyptic empty atmosphere defined by the likes of 28 Days Later, the Omega Man & Day Of The Triffids, yet instead creates the feeling you've been locked in a darkened room against your will for 4 weeks. We lurch from one tedious "lets go here" storyline to "actually no wait, let's go here instead" plot thread - meeting a collection of scarcely-drawn Russian's along the way who occasionally need a little dose of westernised wisdom in order to combat their cowardly, sexist Eastern bloc tendencies and behave appropriately in a crisis-ridden situation.

We'll even face the scenario of plot logic breathtakingly leaping out of the window over & over again. With electricity being the catalyst for the ridiculous outer space creations to impose their aggressive will against humanity; a character will freak out over a pocket radio being switched on yet she’ll be quite content with around a dozen lights illuminating the room that they find themselves in at the time. A singular bus amongst many will manage to take on a life of its own in a sort of Maximum Overdrive kind of way, despite the absence of a foot on the accelerator. We'll have a bunch of mobile phones that'll ring as warning signs despite nobody actually attempting to call them in the first place. Our heroes will invent a special gun that can kill the badly-rendered baddies yet will still resort to classic "Russian bullets" that previously failed. The characters will face a capsizing boat; propelling one of them to make it to shore & run a good 2 miles in the opposite direction of where they need to go (about the length of the average swimming pool), hide within a bus & launch a flare they previously had no knowledge of acquiring. And then the jewel on the crown of shite; despite the cataclysmic devastation wiping out much of the earth's power supply, a character will still manage to receive a text message on board a nuclear submarine - presumably their network provider wasn't O2?

All of this nonsense would be somewhat forgiveable if it were hilariously fun - it isn't. It’s a hateful exercise in boredom & Western consumerism disguised by the premise of an alien invasion flick. Its insistence on going “look there’s a McDonalds, a Starbucks, a shopping centre full of your favourite shops you’ll find back in the good ol’ US of freaking A – so you see, us Russian’s are just like you...but in Russian like, ya know?” is reminiscent of the worst possible tourist – the kind that goes to a foreign country yet only invests their money in everything they already have access to back home. The Darkest Hour? If only it felt that short....

1/5