The Darkest Hour

The enemy is invisible and it kills with a touch. How do you fight that? Find out in The Darkest Hour.

Set in Moscow, two American entrepreneurs are set to meet investors to kick their social media website into gear, but a former partner with whom they forgot to sign a non-disclosure agreement has swept in, stolen their idea and landed the investors for himself. Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella) head off to a nightclub to drown their sorrows and think of a new plan. They run into an American woman, Natalie (Olivia Thirlby), and her friend, Anne (Rachael Taylor), as well as the man who stole their plans, Skylar (Joel Kinnaman). And then the lights go out.

Outside, lights fall from the sky, floating gently to the ground. A police officer tries to touch one with his baton and is ripped to shreads. Suddenly people are being shreaded left and right, and our group of five hides in the store room basement of the club. They spend 5 days locked in, and when the food runs out they decide to try to go for help. Outside, the city is littered with ash, the remnants of people who have been shreaded by the alien invaders. Is there anywhere that's safe?

Like any horror film that isn't complete trash, The Darkest Hour has its tense moments. There are a few decent action scenes, and the science behind the fiction is explained well enough (although I make no claim to the accuracy of their explanations) with only a few character actions making little sense. And while the movie generally worked, the ending was kind of a dud.

Released in 3D in the theaters, it is also available in 3D at home - though I only watched the 2D version that was also included since I haven't shelled out the cash for the glasses to enabled 3D on my 3D capable TV. There are a few rightly deleted Deleted Scenes, as well as a new short film that shows people in other places of the world fighting the invaders. There is also a featurette about the crafting of the aliens and how the film was shot. This along with the feature commentary are actually better than the movie for anyone interested in film making, as director Chris Gorak explains how they had to block out scenes in order to deal with only being able to shoot from one angle each day when on location in Moscow - filming all the shots of a scene that faced west one day, then shooting all the shots of the same scene that faced east the next day, allowing them to sew together scenes that look as if Moscow is empty when the reality is they could only closed half a street or square each day for shooting. Interesting stuff.

The Darkest Hour is far from crap, but it's also a fair distance from being good as well. You won't regret seeing it, but you might regret owning it.