The Darkest Hour

I’m a sucker for post-apocalyptic movies, TV shows, you name it. So I figured I’d give The Darkest Hour a shot. Turns out my afternoon would have been better spent rewatching any episode of The Walking Dead. For starters, the premise is hokey and unnecessary. Two buddies (Emile Hirsch and Max Minghella) go to Moscow to pitch a smart-phone app to some company. As soon as the aliens invade, however, all that’s forgotten as cellphones don’t work anymore anyway. The aliens in this film are nothing like the big-headed, blank-eyed slimers we’ve come to know in most movies. Instead, these extraterrestrials are balls of light that are invisible most of the time, which is actually a bit scarier than battling an army of Martians you can see coming. As far as the post-apocalyptic part goes, however, The Darkest Hour offers very little. Hirsch and Minghella, predictably, are among the survivors and the mystery of the aliens’ weakness is solved absurdly quickly. All this leads up to a rather anticlimactic end. The film’s 3-D option adds next to nothing (but a slight headache) to the viewing experience. Cinemark 14 and Feather River Cinemas. Rated PG-13