Chased by aliens

The Darkest Hour is about two American youngsters who find themselves in the middle of an alien attack in Moscow. Software engineer Ben (Max Minghella) and his friend, Sean (Emile Hirsch), fly to Moscow in order to pitch their latest online venture to investors. However, when they arrive there, they learn that their colleague Skyler (Joel Kinnaman) has brazenly stolen their idea and created a similar website.

They go to a nightclub to drown their sorrows where they meet Natalie (Olivia Thirlby) and Anne (Rachael Taylor). Incidentally, Skyler is also at the same night club. Suddenly strange blobs of light appear and immediately start vapourising any man, woman or dog that gets too close. The quintet of characters hide out in the nightclub kitchen (aliens have the technology for intergalactic travel and invisible shields but are apparently weak if they encounter the mighty doorknob), surviving on canned food until finally venturing out into the abandoned streets. They discover that Moscow is a ghost town and they seem to be the only survivors.

The movie suffers from a lot of inconsistencies which really don’t make any sense whatsoever. For example, while hunting for a map in an abandoned cop car, the intrepid heroes Sean and Ben discover that it is possible to avoid detection from the alien blobs by hiding under a car. This piece of vital information is conveniently forgotten as the characters spend the rest of the movie screaming and running away instead of hiding under the numerous cars that have been abandoned on the streets. I frequently found myself cheering for the alien invaders, than the obtuse human characters I was supposed to be empathising with, who took far less than an hour to initiate a deadening darkness in my head.

Towards the end of the film, the human survivors switch gears, transforming from screaming victims to road warriors but even then the movie fails to be coherent as in one instance where Sean decides to risk the lives of more than a dozen survivors in a bid to rescue Natalie. If these characters are the best humanity has to offer, then we are all doomed.

Published in The Express Tribune, Sunday Magazine, January 15^th, 2012.