This alien invasion movie is lucky I didn’t see it before I made my “Worst of the Year” list because it undoubtedly would have been on it. The Darkest Hour is like any other generic “Aliens are invading!” movie you’ve ever seen except that it’s set in Moscow (and I would be amazed if it was really filmed there as the movie seems to go out of its way to film in generic European settings that could have been shot in Vancouver for all I know) and that’s supposed to make it fresh. [Heavy Spoilers below, for those that give a shit which I’m guessing is no one.]
What Works: For a while, the fact that the aliens are invisible seems interesting (until you realize the movie just didn’t have the budget to show them) and the way they dispatch people by vaporizing them into swirls of dust works (until you realize that’s all they’re going to show you).
What Doesn’t Work: Nothing remotely surprising happens and it’s very clear the movie is following the Alien Invasion Formula where the aliens come, surprise everyone, we figure out that they want one of our precious resources (in this case, metals), all of the characters that are unlikable or non-essential die (the jerk, the old man, the best friends, in that order of course) while the leads live, and finally they find a way to fight against the aliens in the end. The best we can hope for in these movies is an interesting alien and alien autopsy and we get neither one. For 95 percent of the movie we don’t actually see the aliens, and when we do we wish they hadn’t shown them. This is some of the worst CGI I’ve ever seen and that’s saying something.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Just had someone spoiled this movie for me so I wouldn’t waste 90 minutes watching it. So I’ll do that for you now…the aliens come, kill all of the characters except the two leads (Emile Hirsch and Olivia Thrilby as the two central Americans) who escape on a Russian submarine, and the aliens are invisible because of the way they manipulate electromagnetic waves. When the heroes break through the alien’s “invisible forcefield” (eye roll) we see black, incredibly generic looking aliens swirling around in the balls and it just looks like smoky insects with eyes rather than anything we can really see well.