Alien flick fun but mindless

To paraphrase a question from a popular 1972 song, I must ask you, dear reader, do you remember the night the lights went out in Russian Georgia?

Five Americans trying to succeed in business in the middle of Moscow sure remember, because it’s also the same night that aliens landed and sucked all the life out of a good party scene.

That’s essentially the premise for director Chris Gorak’s first major foray as a big time Hollywood director. Gorak cut his teeth as an art director and production designer with some fairly respectable titles under his belt – Minority Report, Fight Club, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and Tombstone. That doesn’t necessarily mean that he knows what he’s doing behind the camera, not even when he’s got Timur Bekmambetov on his side as producer. Bekmambetov is the Uzbeki director with the wild visual style behind such interesting films like Night Watch/Day Watch and Wanted. Certainly he has seen some dark hours in recent cinema, and his newest effort is not much different.

The Darkest Hour refers to the time when some spectacular electric weird aliens fall from the sky, taking all of the power with them. Certainly Winston Churchill would balk at the thought of his famous phrase being used in such a banal way. Cars, cellphones, toasters too, I suppose … they all fall victim to the extraterrestrials with the appetite for electricity. While machines lie dormant, all creatures great and small end up turning into dust at the slightest contact. If you’ve seen the commercials then you know what I’m talking about. Frankly, it seems unlikely that you would watch this movie without having seen the trailers. Sadly, you’ve also already seen most of the parts of the show that you would want to see anyway.

Sean (Emile Hirsch), Natalie (Olivia Thirlby), Ben (Max Minghella), Anne (Rachael Taylor), Skyler (Joel Kinnaman) and Mikey (Joshua Seth) are all on the scene when things first start to look bad. When the aliens land, it is only briefly reminiscent of the opening of Skyline. When the zapping starts to happen – and for the rest of the movie – it plays out more like the most recent War of the Worlds remake where the aliens’ insect-like tripod attack ships sent out some kind of death rays that instantaneously turned people into street dust. So this movie doesn’t really introduce any new concepts either way, but it does seem new to have the aliens more interested and interactive in the electrical nature of the world, so that’s something.

It is, however, somewhat novel to have an American-produced sci-fi movie about aliens invading the planet, where they don’t start in Los Angeles, New York, Washington, D.C., or all of the above. In my opinion, it’s too bad that the heroes who save the day are still American but that’s just how Hollywood works, isn’t it?

Since you’re only coming to this movie for special effects, the good news is that you don’t have to wait long. The action starts at about the ten-minute mark, taking a great cue from the playbook for how to make a movie that will keep people’s interest.

The other good news is that the whole thing clocks in at less than 90 minutes, giving you enough time before you retire to bed to discuss the salient points about this intellectual thought piece.

That’s sarcasm, of course. This is just a brainless exercise in special effects that quickly becomes tiresome, but since it stars 20-year-olds then there must be a population of recent high school grads who will flock to this tedious adventure with much enthusiasm. The effects, like the acting, quickly grow tiresome. My favourite point was during the first encounter. Some thespian extra in the crowd emits the classic line “Whoa,” a spot on impression of Keanu Reeves at his finest. That about summed up the intelligence quotient of the entire enterprise. Fun, but absolutely mindless.