Director: Chris Gorak
Cast: Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella, Rachael Taylor, Olivia Thirlby, Joel Kinnaman, Veronika Ozerova
Writer: Jon Spaihts, Leslie Bohem, M.T. Ahern
MPAA Rating: PG-13 (for sci-fi action, violence and some language)
Run Time: 88 minutes
Synopsis:
A Sci-fi thriller featuring mind-blowing special effects from the minds of visionary filmmaker Timur Bekmambetov (Wanted) and director Chris Gorak (Art Director Fight Club, Minority Report),The Darkest Hour is the story of five young people who find themselves stranded in Moscow, fighting to survive in the wake of a devastating alien attack.
In the film, two internet entrepreneurs named Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella) travel to Moscow on business and find themselves amidst an alien invasion. After sheltering themselves during the initial attack, along with three other survivors, Natalie (Olivia Thirlby), Anne (Rachael Taylor) and Skylar (Joel Kinnaman), they sneak through the city evading alien invaders who feed off human energy like fuel.
Truth-be-told, I am a big fan of Timur Bekmambetov (Night Watch, Wanted) as a director, and while he is only the producer of The Darkest Hour, I had hoped his name being on the film would ensure at least a bit more quality than I had gleaned from the trailers. Sadly, I was wrong. Like many sci-fi thrillers throughout the years, The Darkest Hour, which was directed by Chris Gorak employs a virtually invisible enemy to inspire visceral fear in both the audience and the movie’s protagonists.
The big difference between The Darkest Hour and most of those other sci-fi thrillers throughout the years is that many of them (like Predator for instance) don’t suck. That’s not to say that The Darkest Hour isn’t entertaining, or a fun way to burn through 90 minutes, it is at least that.
When I saw the name Jon Spaights on the opening credits, I didn’t expect the story to be as sloppy as it is. If you’re unfamiliar with Spaights, we recently reported that he was tapped by Universal to pen the Untitled Mummy Reboot and he has a writing credit on Ridley Scott’s forthcoming film, Prometheus. If The Darkest Hour is a good representation of Spaights’ work, I’m really glad that Damon Lindelof and Scott took a pass at the script for Prometheus after Spaights and for all intents and purposes rewrote the story… otherwise I would be paranoid that his participation would be a harbinger of doom for that long-awaited and highly anticipated film.
Most of the effects in The Darkest Hour are pretty cool, and using the backdrop of Russia for the film definitely added some visual “pop” to the film. I liked the concept of the film… in theory. Don’t get me wrong, I almost wish that someone would take the same concept, expand on it, add some actual character development, more reality-based science and preferably some real substance to the plot, and it could be a good film. Is that asking too much?
While their dialogue isn’t fantastic, Emile Hirsch, Joel Kinnaman and Olivia Thrilby all do a decent job with the cards they’re dealt. Max Minghella was forgettable and Rachael Taylor‘s character was just whiny and obnoxious enough that you kept hoping she would be a fatality sooner-rather-than-later… and she’s not even supposed to be a “baddie”. The character development is so thin in the film that you don’t really care about any of them or their relationships any way, which makes any potential tragedy or triumph for the characters fall completely flat.
The bonus features on the disc are rather scant. The Blu-ray Special Edition includes The Darkest Hour: Survivors, a short film which follows survivors as they continue to battle the aliens. The other special feature is The Darkest Hour: Visualizing An Invasion, which is a behind the scenes look at the visual effects in the film. The only remaining features are the standard deleted and extended scenes and the ever present audio commentaries.
The video quality of the Blu-ray was fantastic, the audio quality while good was imbalanced in some of the early Moscow nightclub scenes, in which the dialogue was very subdued and the music was way over the top.
I give The Darkest Hour on Blu-ray Two Out of Five Stars
[AMAZONPRODUCT=B0073U2F2Q]
