The Darkest Hour indeed

The Darkest Hour popped up as a trailer on one of my DVD’s and I thought “That might be something I’d enjoy seeing”.

So I watched it.

It is in fact better than the rating it receives on IMDB. it is an pretty good Science Fiction movie, borrowing themes from all the great SCI/FI films. You can see parallels to a lot of great film in it. It however “borrows” with dignity, it achieves it’s own right or value.

Synopsis:

A bunch of young people come together in the face of disaster when Moscow (and eventually the rest of the world) falls subject to a massive Alien invasion. Invisible beings that disintegrates humans upon contact arrive en mass in search for precious metals which are found in abundance on earth. These aliens destroy anything electrical or rather eats up all the electricity.

We follow these youngsters as they navigate the city in search of rescue, learning more and more about their foe along the way. 

Eventually reaching the pseudo-ending we are familiar with from films like 28 days later or anyone of George A. Romero’s zombie apocalyptic films.  

Let me begin with pointing out that this is an Science fiction movie, so those of you who cant use your imagination needn’t even try. And just because it is a fairly new film with young people doesn’t mean it is filled with half naked girls like most of the other films are. We get some scenes which have people showing some skin, but for the most part the focus lies on telling the story. Cred to the filmmaker there.

The CGI/effects are nicely done and look plausible. A lot of buildings being imploded and humans disintegrated. And the aliens are pretty well done. You don’t get to see them a whole lot  which is good. I’m a firm believer of “The less you see the more frightened you will be”. 

The story also is mostly plausible and drives the story forward to it’s non ending. There are certainly lots of room for improvement. But being rated as a SCI/FI action movie we can let a lot of things slide.

Except for ONE crucial thing.

The screenwriter has obviously no understanding of how a Faraday cage works. They find a radio inside a birdcage crudely constructed as a Faraday cage. It’s antenna routed outside the cage. They then proceed to bring this radio inside a huge room build as a Faraday cage, which shields our “heroes” from the Aliens vision, not routing it’s antenna outside. And behold they get a signal and listens to a message pivotal to the story.

Lets break it down a bit. A Faraday Cage blocks external static and non-static electric fields. “Faraday cages cannot block static or slowly varying magnetic fields, such as the Earth’s magnetic field (a compass will still work inside). To a large degree, though, they shield the interior from external electromagnetic radiation if the conductor is thick enough and any holes are significantly smaller than the wavelength of the radiation.”

What this mean is that if they were able to get a radio signal inside due to the size of the holes in the “mesh” surrounding the room, surely the electromagnetic fields from their bodies should slip out. For doubters look here where we can see that Radio waves are a lot longer than IR waves which most of our body’s radiation consists of. Hence, if Radio gets in, then the significantly smaller waves from their bodies gets out. Effectively punching a hole in this plot. Boy I just love to do this…

Another smaller “plot-hole” is that they use light bulbs for warning devices against the aliens. bulbs light up when aliens are near. So they throw a lot of them around. And I don’t know if anyone of you ever tried throwing light bulbs on concrete or stone. But they tend to break, which they in fact visibly do in the film (sloppy digital editing?). And when they break they don’t usually work so well seing that the vacuum is no more. But they do in the film. Every single one of them. Impressive throwing. 

 

Aside from that, it was an entertaining film, a lot better than I had hoped. And Emile Hirsch is contrary to his looks a rather good actor.

We also see newly appointed Robocop, Joel Kinnaman, in one of the roles as a egotistical whining gunslinging dumbass.

I give this film 6 out of 10, It gets this high grade mostly due to the look and theme of the film (love a good apocalyptic story) and because a lot of the main characters die (even a few surprising ones). It would be higher if the ending was more definite and if the filmmakers had paid attention during physics class in high school. 

Not 2 cool for school.