The Darkest Hour

Urban survival, guerrilla style. This sort of movie traditionally focused on war stories and, in the form of Daniel Craig's non-Bond excursion Defiance, occasionally still does. But the trend now is for the enemy to be zombies, aliens or some kind of mutant distortion of humankind created when foolish scientists muck about with the human genome (which is in itself a development of Mary Shelley's nineteenth century ideas).

The Darkest Hour sees young American internet entrepreneurs Emile Hirsch and Max Minghella team up with Judge Anderson, I mean, Olivia Thirlby, and her Aussie pal plus an ever changing (regularly dying) gang of tourists and locals to survive alien invasion in Moscow. So far so Skyline, only in Moscow.

The aliens are invisible, like they're on a slightly different frequency of light or something. I dunno, it's not very well explained but has to do with microwaves. Fire other microwaves at them and they become visible and their armour cracks, meaning they might be vulnerable to earthly guns. Quite why the aliens are here isn't fully understood until close to the end of the film - asset-stripping? - but what is clear is that the young groovy folk and their pals are darned well going to fight back.

They learn that a Faraday cage set-up and mirrors or reflective glass can mask the presence of humans from the aliens, knowledge that along with a passing scientist's microwave gun allows them to scrape their way through several tense scenarios on their way to a nuclear submarine (an underwater Faraday cage) which becomes the promised land. Or a suitable destination to head for in order to successfully conclude such a movie.

And they get there. Except Max Minghella who doesn't. Emile and Olivia get there. They're the prettiest, of course they do. They find a young Russian lass along the way. She's quite pretty. She gets there too. That's how these things work, isn't it? The less pretty characters are for comic relief and cannon fodder.

Despite destroying Moscow the film still acts as quite a tourist lure. I'm certainly more interested in seeing the Parisian style boulevards and buildings. Not if there really has been an alien invasion, of course, but I'm thinking there hasn't. Our lizard overlords from deep under the ground wouldn't stand for it.