The Darkest Hour: C'mon, give it up for the B movie!

Click here for trailer.

(Be Advised - SPOILERS)

I liked "Skyline" (2010) and I like "The Darkest Hour" (2011), and fuck off if your one of those prigs who doesn't like a good B movie. And these movies are both definitely B movies, without pretension to be otherwise, and are clever uses of small budgets. You don't go to Disneyland expecting the Louvre, and you don't expect funky, cheapie alien invasion flicks to be Masterpiece Theater. Unless you're a dick. Don't be a dick.

The Darkest Hour follows two American friends, two found American girls, a German asshole who steals the boys' website, and a cute Russian chick, through the eradication of human race by bad aliens. It's a formula, and it keeps getting repeated over and over. In "Skyline," you also have a small bunch trying to survive a bunch of invading aliens, holed up in a highrise, which itself is an admirably scrappy way of milking a whole movie out of aliens without having to spend a lot of money (they spent $500,000 on shooting, and $10,000,000 on visual effects). Darkest Hours goes a bit more upscale at $30,000,000 (probably because it was produced by that crazy Russian director of Day Watch, Bekmambetov), and actually shot in 3d, which I don't hate as much as the Cohen Brothers, but really, that would be hard to do. Thank the divinity of your choice that I could watch it in 2d.

Aliens as unintentional solution to
energy crisis?

So. The Darkest Hour has the boys fly into Moscow to pitch a website (or app, maybe?), which gets ripped off by a German kid (Dutch? Czech? Anyway, some European douche bag), presumably their former partner, who they then re-meet up with at a swank Russian disco. They meet up with two American girls (one looking like the sister of Anne Hathaway), and without much ado, the aliens attack. Sorry, the aliens attack! And part of the fun (if you're not a dick) of these movies is to see what kind of aliens they inflict on the human race. Here, the aliens are "wave" creatures, electrical somehow, who walk/fly/float around in inviso-shields and microwave the humans, sometimes directly and sometimes grabbing them with electrical cords and then pulling them into the appropriate microwavable distance. The coolness factor here is in the contortions that the dying do enroute to being powdered. It looks like the wire-work guys and stunt people had a lot of fun whipping through the air, to be CG'ed into glittery powder. ("Skyline" had people getting yanked into the sky, or sucked, vacuum-like, into the sky, and then having their brains litterally extracted. The aliens were litterally after their brains. Their brains! That's fucking funny.)

Ok. Many hip Muscovites get twistilly fried, while our heroes hide in a basement for several days, until emerging into a silent and ash-strewn city. The white ash is PEOPLE! (Soylent Green reference, what what.) They then do what all such heroes have to do, being, they must learn the new rules of the game. This they quickly do, noticing (humans are clever) that the aliens turn on electrical devices, and thus, like a light-stench, announce their presence. For unknown arcane reasons, they can't see through glass. Yeah, I know, but don't be a dick.

European douche bag, redeemed!

My wife and I watched it and tried to guess who gets sacrificed first. Yup, the European douche bag! Stupid and venal probably-German guy goes wandering out with a machine gun, then sacrifices himself in touching redemption for douche baggery, allowing our heroes to escape. Then out they go, find a Russian mad scientist type who informs them on more Rules of Game, and gives them a magic wand to stop the aliens (a gun that shoots microwaves). Mayhem ensues, they flee, find Russian soldiers who have learned how to wound the bastard aliens, then they all go through the subway, we lose a hero, then another hero (oh, wait, that was back with the scientist), onto safety, then rescue mission, then heroic destruction of several aliens, then off on a submarine as news of fighting back comes to them. Hurray, humans!

Today's Tom Sawyer, with mineral theft
in background.

Oh, and we learn that the aliens are here to mine the Earth's mineral resources.

Ok, here's the alien quibbles. And this does not mean that I don't like the movie. If these kind of movies made too much sense, then there would be a very short movie with little tension, because the More Advanced Species would simply drop toxic mold into the atmosphere and go have mohitos until all humans were dead. A little ridiculousness is necessary for conflict, but having them just be butt-fuck stupid, like the water-toxic aliens in Signs, that's just criminal behavior. Don't do that.

So, quibble one, which is the same as in my Avengers review: don't attack a whole species with foot soldiers. If your intention is to wipe out the species, as opposed to strategic political control, it is terribly inefficient to send in individual troopers. Like, hello aliens, there's 7 billion of us! It makes good screen time, but c'mon, if you made the trip all the way from timbuktu star system, didn't you have time to think through your attack plan better?

Quibble two: why does such an advanced species not have walkie talkies? When one of their members is attacked by the Russians, given how many of them we see falling from the sky onto Moscow, why don't they, like, call someone? "[Static radio crackle] This is Gor Formore, soldier ID#45678. I'm getting my ass shot off here by some of these buggers. Could maybe all you local fellow attacking alien comrades, who I know aren't fucking busy because the whole population is floating around like super-zapped popcorn--could you come swarm these bastards before I pop like a zit?" You know, our soldiers invented such strategies, uh, I'm pretty sure back in Egyptian days, so maybe better strategic protocols might be in order.

Quibble three: wouldn't it have been easier extracting Earth's mineral resources somewhere in the Australian outback, instead of all over Moscow and other major cities. I'm pretty sure the molten core/mantle/whatever (Heather said that's what they were after) exists all over and under the crust (our little scab of home...). Seems like that would have precluded some of the angry monkey reactions.

Limited sensors.

Ok, end of alien quibbles. Oh, wait, fourth quibble: again, being all advanced and shit, why haven't they developed better sensors, like ones that can see through glass, or can switch from electromagnetic to (human) visable light spectrums, and beyond that? We're vulnerable fleshy apes, easy to flash-cook, and yet we developed that tech a long time ago. Get with the times, aliens.

Now quibbles have ended. It's fun, these films, just that. Not highbrow, not sophisticated, but regurgitations of formulas that speak to basic archetypal fears and hopes of humans, much broader and deeper themes than some bio-pic or Emotional Human Drama. These films speak, crudely, loudly, often quite unconsciously, to some of the archetectual sub-structures of the human psyche, and in a way that's not all cluttered up with detailed personalities and relationships. Those simply are not the point. The point is to fill in the mold and let you experience that level of the human mind in a more obvious form.

And I love that. In this setting, the lack of "human detail" actually allows a clearer experience, in this case, of the fear of loss of control and relationship, and then the restoration of control and relationship. Aliens, volcanoes, invading Mongol hordes, viruses, doesn't matter and shouldn't matter to the watcher, because they are just the foils or forms.

So come to these movies in all their B glory, like one of those x-rays that shows a man walking, but only in his skeletal structure. Don't expect him to be all fleshed-up and anxious about upcoming taxes. Leave that to PBS and don't be a dick.