The Darkest Hour

Running out to see The Darkest Hour...my thoughts will be up shortly.

Alright...I have seen The Darkest Hour.  Quick rundown?  Much better than I expected.  Of course, I expected it to be unwatchable, so that may not be saying much.  As a rule, I try not to base my movie choices purely on reviews.  Depending on the author, I do read reviews on Cinemablend.com.  If you don't, you should start.  Some of their writers are pretty good.  I also have a tendancy to check the overall scores at rottentomatoes.com.  When looking at reviews for The Darkest Hour, they were all pretty terrible.  We had originally planned on seeing this when it came out, but re-aligned our choice of movies for Christmas day due to so many other well reviewed movies being out there.

How you feel about a movie is sometimes a reflection of how you feel at that moment.  It can be influenced by the audience, as well.  Of course, the film itself has an impact.  Tonight, I was happy to go to the movies, annoyed with the morons at the back of the theater, and entertained by the film.  Had I seen this movie on Christmas day, it may have been another story.  

The film follows a group of survivors during an alien attack.  Yes, I realize I am talking about another alien invasion movie when I talked about Battle: Los Angeles yesterday.  This fact was not lost on me.  Anyway, the aliens are largely undetectable to the eye, which is an interesting new twist.  Of course, it's not that new.  Some of you may remember a movie called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.  When we first saw trailers for The Darkest Hour, we were instantly reminded of the Final Fantasy movie.  I actually kept forgetting the name of the movie I saw tonight in its early marketing because we just called it The Spirits Within.  If you haven't seen the Final Fantasy movie, you really don't need to.  You can check out the the nifty Thriller dance they did with the characters on Youtube. 

Getting back on track, it was wonderful to watch a movie that managed to be tense without jump out scares.  Having invisible aliens should make jump out scares nigh impossible, but let's not underestimate how lazy filmmakers can be.  For anyone that has seen the Descent, just imagine copper pipes.  

As with most horror movies, the characters are quite cliche.  Random jumps in logic are made that seem a bit farfetched.  The special effects towards the end of the movie fail to impress.  Mark's summation of the special effects near the end of the film was "dumb".  For those of you who know who Sinistar is, I'm just glad to see he is still getting work.  And for all of you Top Chef fans, the Russian Tom Coliccio is in The Darkest Hour, as well.

If you have some time to kill and want a decent alien invasion movie that is done a bit different, check out the Darkest Hour.  Save a couple bucks and see it as a matinee though.  It was fun.  Go in expecting it to suck, and you may be pleasantly surprised.

On a side note, they were out of the refillable popcorn buckets at my theater, but they assure me they'll be getting more in.  If you they do not, you can expect to hear about it.

(Moved from FB - January 10, 2012)