The Darkest Hour

Chris Gorak, director of the memorable "Right at your Door", directs "The Darkest Hour", a low budget alien invasion movie.

The film has been justifiably criticised for its poor production values and generic plot, but approach it (why should you?) as a trashy, pulpy, B-movie science fiction film (in the vein of John Carpenter or old alien invasion movies from the 1950s), and it works.

The plot? A group of young Americans find themselves in Moscow when aliens launch a massive, planet-wide invasion. The film then takes the format of "slasher", "post apocalyptic" and "survivor" movies, our heroes dodging aliens, struggling to fight back and coping with the loss of friends.

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The Darkest Hour

Most of the film's horror sequences don't work, but there are some good moments scattered about, like those in which our heroes scamper around iconic Russian landmarks, run into a cool band of Russian resistance fighters or encounter a mad engineer who lives in a giant Faraday cage.

The aliens themselves are somewhat interesting. They're floating blobs of energy, mostly invisible, a trait which lends the film its most interesting qualities. Because the creatures are invisible, Gorak is able to cook up a unique form of tension, your imagination – always more powerful than any special effect – called upon to generate the film's scares.

Because the aliens cause deactivated bulbs, lights and car lamps to re-illuminate, Gorak is also able to engineer some interesting sequences in which our heroes rely upon the re-illumination of bulbs/lamps to serve as an advanced warning; an indicator of an alien's presence.

The film ends with some terrible action sequences and its characters are all cardboard, but that is to be expected. It was written by Jon Spaihts, who wrote the screenplay to another alien movie, Ridley Scott's "Prometheus".

Strangely, between the years 2003 and 2012 there was a huge increase in alien and alien invasion movies ("District 9", "Cowboys and Aliens", "Skyline", "V", "The Darkest Hour", "Monsters", "Transformers", "Night Skies", "War of the Worlds", "The Invasion", "Alien Abduction", "Battle: LA", "Battleship", "Paul", "Super 8", "Area 51").

Most of these films celebrate American resilience (even when set in Moscow!) and either play on western fears or play to various power fantasies, demonising an Other (who is always presented as a cohesive horde, a homogeneous mass devoid of individuals) who need be promptly eradicated.

Tellingly, the last burst in alien-invasion movies occurred between 1949 and 1959, at the peak of communist mania.

7/10 - See "Vanishing on 7th Street" instead.