Susan Granger’s review of “The Darkest Hour” (Summit Entertainment)
Sneaking into theaters at the end of the year, this wannabe sci-fi, doomsday thriller introduces two American Internet entrepreneurs, Sean (Emile Hirsch) and Ben (Max Minghella) who travel to Moscow to find funding for their new social media website. When they discover that a duplicitous Swedish opportunist, Skyler (Joel Kinnaman), has stolen their location-based idea,
they drown their sorrows at the trendy Zvezda Nightclub and distract themselves with two winsome tourists, Natalie (Olivia Thirlby) and Anne (Rachael Taylor), en route to Nepal – until the aliens attack.
Hundreds of thousands of fireballs suddenly descend from the night sky, vaporizing all humans in their path. The frolicking foursome, along with Skyler, find refuge in a basement and when they emerge, five days later, they discover utter devastation. Not only has the entire city been besieged but all power sources have been consumed by the ravenous yet elusive extraterrestrials.
That’s when they encounter an engineer-turned-inventor (Dato Bakhtadze); an audacious teenage scavenger (Veronika Vernadskaya); and a partisan technician (Gosha Kutsenko), perched astride a heavily armored horse, leading a small, ragtag army of disposable survivors against invaders who can be detected only by their electrowave energy.
Written by Jon Spaight, based on a story by Leslie Boehm, M.T. Ahern and art director-turned-helmer Chris Gorak (“Right at Your Door”), it makes the most of the Russian capital’s iconic architectural exoticism, especially when the panicked survivors dash through eerily deserted Red Square and across Patriarch Bridge.
But the flimsily-delineated characters are not very interesting and none of the pointless plot makes much sense, particularly the doomsday humor – tossing out lame lines like “What’s the dress code for the end of the world? Jacket, no tie?” And the conceptual teasers, like the semi-invisible aliens’ cloaking devices, offer no satisfying visual reveal or payoff.
“The audience will enjoy it and feel it’s something new,” producer Timur Bekmambetov promises in the publicity notes. As if!
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “The Darkest Hour” is a dim-witted 2. As an apocalyptic motion picture, it’s truly a disaster.
