Reviewed by GREG KING

Director: Chris Gorak

Stars: Emile Hirsch, Max Minghella, Olivia Thirlby, Rachael Taylor, Veronika Ozerova, Joel Kinnaman, Dato Bakhtadze, Gosha Kutsenko.

The Darkest Hour ranks alongside other recent alien invasion movies like the noisy and disappointing Battle: Los Angeles and Skyline. This is yet another cliched, special effects driven war of the worlds variation, with humans battling against overwhelming odd as aliens invade Earth, intent on wiping out humanity.
Russian director Timur Bekmambetov is a pioneer of cutting edge technology and special effects, which he used to good effect in his kinetically paced sci-fi films Day Watch and Night Watch, and his Hollywood debut Wanted. His fingerprints are all over this special effects driven thriller about an alien invasion, which has been directed by Chris Gorak (the chillingly effective but little seen low budget thriller Right At Your Door), who comes from a background in visual effects and production design.
Visually the film is impressive, with some stunning cinematography from Scott Kervan, but dramatically it is less impressive. There are some wonderful establishing shots of Moscow that show how the city has embraced commercialism in the brave new post-Cold War era, with McDonalds, Starbucks, modern advertising billboards and other symbols of western culture everywhere. But apart from the exotic locations, The Darkest Hour really has little to offer that is fresh or particularly exciting, and is a wasted opportunity. As a genre piece it lacks the spark of the recent Attack The Block.
Young American businessmen Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella, son of the late film director Anthony Minghella) arrive in Moscow to promote their Internet based tourist service, only to discover that sleazy Swedish entrepreneur Skyler (Joel Kinnaman, from The Killing) has ripped them off. Drowning their sorrows that night at a nightclub they strike up a conversation with two tourists Natalie (Olivia Thirlby) and Anne (Australian star Rachael Taylor). They also see a brilliant display of lights over the city that turns out to be an alien invasion. These extraterrestrial invaders are balls of energy that disintegrate humans and seem to feed off electricity.
Our heroes manage to hide in the basement for four days, and emerge to find the city deserted, devastated and left in ruins. Cars lie abandoned on the empty streets. The sight of an eerily deserted, post-apocalyptic Red Square is reminiscent of similar scenes of a deserted London in the zombie thriller 28 Days. The film even seems to offer a riff on I Am Legend or even The Omega Man. Our heroes desperately try to avoid the aliens as they make their way to the safety of a nuclear submarine on the other side of the city.
Even though they are ill equipped to face the technologically superior aliens, Sean and Ben lead a handful of citizens in fighting back. “It’s the end of the invasion, and the start of the war!” declares Sean. They join forces with a feisty young tomboy Vika (Veronika Ozerova), who has been living on her wits, and Sergei (Dato Bakhtadze), an eccentric inventor who has created some sort of microwave gun he believes is effective against the invisible enemy. And there’s a band of heavily armed heroic Cossacks, led by Matvei (Bekmambetov regular Gosha Kutsenko).
Sean, Max and the girls are strangers in a strange land, which should add to the air of dread, but unfortunately there seems to be a lack of real menace in the screenplay written by Jon Spaiht (one of the writers on Ridley Scott’s forthcoming Alien prequel Prometheus). There are numerous inconsistencies and gaping holes in the plot here, which Gorak’s uninspired direction fails to gloss over.
Unfortunately the attractive young cast are given little to do with their one-dimensional stock characters. Hirsch, who once showed plenty of potential as a strong young actor in films like Into The Wild, etc, is disappointingly bland and annoying as he delivers some of the lamest dialogue heard in the cinema for a long time. Minghella (The Social Network, etc) works his way through the film on autopilot, and he deserves better. Thirlby and Taylor are the typical damsels in distress.
The CGI effects that create the aliens soon wear thin. The Darkest Hour also comes in a 3D version, although, as is normal, the process adds little to the film itself. After a film like Hugo, which used the 3D process brilliantly, The Darkest Hour comes across as even more of a disappointment.

**