THE DARKEST HOUR - archive from 1st February 2012.

Saw 'THE DARKEST HOUR' at my local multiplex last night. Another shoot 'em up Sci-Fi actioner that does have some redeeming features. Directed by Chris Gorak and Produced by Timur Bekmambetov ('Nightwatch', 'Daywatch' & 'Wanted'), this has all the latter Director/Producer trademarks all over it. Set in Moscow rather than the staple New York, Los Angeles, Chicago or San Fran this features a largely invisible alien foe who descend upon our planet and immediately set about vapourising our population to rob us of our natural mineral resources.

A largely unknown cast
except for Emil Hirsch and Rachel Taylor the story surrounds two US tech-savvy geeks - Ben and Sean (Max Minghella and Emil Hirsch respectively) who travel to Russia to promote their new social media/party locating software. When they are betrayed by their Swedish partner Skylar (Joel Kinnaman) the disappear to a club to drown their sorrows and meet up with two young holidaying chicks - Natalie from the US (Olivia Thirlby) and Anne from Australia (Rachel Taylor).

Exiting the club all together they witness strange lights up in the sky which then begin to decend to the ground and disappear. After the commotion a policeman standing close by approaches the scene whereupon he disintegrates, as do a number of other close bystanders. The lights as it runs out are alien beings protected by an almost invisible forcefield.

What follows is a fairly standard cat & mouse game as invading aliens wipe out all human life forms on sight, and the invasion is global. Our four friends duck, dive, bob & weave past oncoming alien attackers, through the rubble that once was Moscow, and into a short lived sanctuary where they learn that these pesky no-good alien varmints can in fact be thwarted by microwaves, and that they cannot see through glass.

Coming across various enclaves of hauled up humans fighting the resistance against said alien interlopers, our four heroes continue to fight and pass on their alien thwarting knowledge to others as they pass through. It all ends with a set piece on some Moscow river with a nuclear submarine parked up ready to take them to safety . . . and hope!!

The alien creature FX are well conceived and convincingly rendered, a post apocolyptic Moscow cityscape is impressively visualised, and the action set pieces are good enough . . . but still it lacks something! A little predictable, the 3D does nothing for it either, and there is plenty of other similar Sci-Fi end of the world alien attack fodder out there to choose from too. Costing US$30M to make it brought in US$65M so was only a modest commercial success but fared less well at the time from the critics. You can catch it now on DVD and BluRay.

-Steve, at Odeon Online-