Under the guise of a Christmas blockbuster, The Darkest Hour ends the year in alien encounter films on a low note. Starring Emile Hirsch and a cast of others who you would vaguely recognize from their other films, The Darkest Hour has a group of tourists in their early 20s encountering an alien race attacking Earth in order to drain our energy supply. The concept is interesting enough. The aliens can’t be seen and they disintegrate people in an instant. But it’s too much of a lost cause from the get go.
Having seen so many of these apocalypse type movies, there is a certain need for the actions of the earthlings to be genuine. Now if what seems to be 99 percent of the entire population were killed in an instant, I can’t believe this group of lucky survivors is only slightly upset about it. I’m all for keeping a level head but come on. Then on a performance level, the acting is adequate, but the dialogue is weak and the plot development predictable. When the group encounters the renegades wearing vests made of keys, and they gain the use of what can only be described as proton-pack from Ghostbusters, the predictable turns into the cheesy stuff of a straight to DVD release.
The has been a ridiculous amount of alien movies in 2011, and that may have something to do with the public’s total impatience toward a campy release like The Darkest Hour. Disaster movies are successful for a potential hope they provide when people fight back. But the world is dead in the first half hour. The half-hearted attempts at resolution in the final scene are only good for the audience to roll their eyes at. There are a handful of successful scenes scattered throughout, but the problem is that I knew they were coming before the happened. (5.5 out of 10)
No comments:
Post a Comment