This was actually quite a fun movie, far better than so many of the "Worst Movie Ever" reviews offered here would have you think.
It's a straight-forward, well-produced apocalyptic aliens-attack flick.
I even found the dialogue and acting quite natural and engaging. The characters did set up irrational hopes and goals for themselves, but then irrational hopes and goals are perfectly natural responses given the fact that they were all young, shell-shocked and inexperienced in the ways of apocalyptic alien attacks.
So it's a neat little film. Though it offered a few interesting new ideas, it didn't do anything super ground breaking, and it followed basic story formula, but it did so with smooth competence and I found myself engaged throughout.
What I find far *more* interesting, and what I don't fully understand, is the very strong negative reaction from so many people here...
I have a theory about that: This film showed the human race getting easily trounced by aliens which didn't obey any laws of physics we understand. The invaders used none of the regular high-tech equipment we've seen countless times before in alien films. Nope. Instead, these aliens were more like ghosts. How do you fight a ghost? I think perhaps this is what audiences found upsetting: Darkest Hour didn't fortify the nursery rhyme of intrinsic human superiority, not like we saw in Independence Day, where despite their giant space ships and White House destroying super-beam weapons, we were still able to use ridiculously primitive human technology (computer viruses and nukes? c'mon!) and good-ol' human gumption to defeat the alien menace because they were truly stupid, and aside from being ugly, were not actually so very different from us.
Instead, Darkest Hour showed us aliens which don't even obey the same laws of physics we understand. It made humanity look small and vulnerable, and resistance futile. (The film *did* try to supply the audience with a hope that humanity might be able to fight back. The odds looked pretty long to me, though.)
Maybe people don't like to see that concept in their entertainment and reject it from a gut level.
Just a theory.
It's a straight-forward, well-produced apocalyptic aliens-attack flick.
I even found the dialogue and acting quite natural and engaging. The characters did set up irrational hopes and goals for themselves, but then irrational hopes and goals are perfectly natural responses given the fact that they were all young, shell-shocked and inexperienced in the ways of apocalyptic alien attacks.
So it's a neat little film. Though it offered a few interesting new ideas, it didn't do anything super ground breaking, and it followed basic story formula, but it did so with smooth competence and I found myself engaged throughout.
What I find far *more* interesting, and what I don't fully understand, is the very strong negative reaction from so many people here...
I have a theory about that: This film showed the human race getting easily trounced by aliens which didn't obey any laws of physics we understand. The invaders used none of the regular high-tech equipment we've seen countless times before in alien films. Nope. Instead, these aliens were more like ghosts. How do you fight a ghost? I think perhaps this is what audiences found upsetting: Darkest Hour didn't fortify the nursery rhyme of intrinsic human superiority, not like we saw in Independence Day, where despite their giant space ships and White House destroying super-beam weapons, we were still able to use ridiculously primitive human technology (computer viruses and nukes? c'mon!) and good-ol' human gumption to defeat the alien menace because they were truly stupid, and aside from being ugly, were not actually so very different from us.
Instead, Darkest Hour showed us aliens which don't even obey the same laws of physics we understand. It made humanity look small and vulnerable, and resistance futile. (The film *did* try to supply the audience with a hope that humanity might be able to fight back. The odds looked pretty long to me, though.)
Maybe people don't like to see that concept in their entertainment and reject it from a gut level.
Just a theory.