The Darkest Hour
The famous invisible aliens film is not as bad as it seems. Pretty tame for a Timur-adjacent film.
Two random tech bros go to Moscow seeking 10 million bucks in funding for their app: Uber for bars. Their liaison is a Swedish dude, who proceeds to stab them in the back by translating their presentation to Russian and pass it off as his work.
Oh well, the trust fund kids recognise they are in a lawless jungle, where rule of law does not apply, and even though they blew 12k on this deal, they will get back home with nothing but a good story to tell at parties.
Since the tech dude still has the root password, he uses it for exactly what you are thinking: creeping around user profiles for hot chicks. They see they are going to this Zvezda bar, and so are they. What’s worse, the Swedish dude is there too, just to rub their failure on their faces.
Anyway, they meet up with the girls, bond, and are about to get their numbers, when aliens attack! Invisibly turning people into ash. Out Swedish dude dumps her escort behind a door to her death, but eventually joins up with our 4 protagonists in the basement.
When the canned food runs out, they venture onto 28 Days Later Moscow (less than a week later, actually), with abandoned cars, empty department stores, and some invisible aliens lurking around. They devise detectors out of lightbulbs on lanyards, and try to reach the American embassy.
It’s all for nought, they were borked too. They did held up for longer, and managed to get more information about the rest of the world, and it’s dire. Only pockets of survivors remain. Speaking of survivors, they see a light in one of those giant apartment complexes, and they eventually get there, not before the Swedish dude semi-redemption by sacrificing himself to save the dudes.
The light is actually a teenage girl, being protected by an older eccentric dude, with a knack for gadgets (damn, it’s really 28 Days Later). He devises a sort of EMP gun that should stun the aliens, and they translate the radio broadcast mentioning a nuclear sub will leaving in a few hours. They decide make a break for it, but the beta girl leaves the door open and the inventor and herself are dusted by a sneaking alien.
They reach half way there, when they meet the local cowboys, the equivalent of anti-authoritarian rednecks. They will not leave their fatherland, but will help them to the sub, through the subway.
Since the beta dude hasn’t got anything else to live for (since the love interest is dead), he sacrifices himself to save the teenage girl. I almost forgot I was watching a Russian film, so killing off main characters is just a regular thing.
They are almost at the sub, but there’s still the final set piece, where the redneck and our hero rescue the alpha girl, who got separated from them, launched flares and holed up in a trolleybus.
They improve the EMP gun, and prepare for the rescue raid. Our heroes zap aliens, blow them up, and even splash them with water to kill them good. Even the teenage girl slips by to launch some Molotov cocktails at them.
Our alpha couple gets to the sub to ride into the sunset, with the teenage kid tagging along, but the rednecks cannot leave their country. They will fight the invaders who want to extract their resources. The war is about to begin, and how…
The main cast are talented, but there are not many opportunities for big breakout roles. The dudes are Speed Racer and the driver from The Handmaid’s Tale, and from the girls I only know the psychic from Dredd. The Swedish dude is also a familiar face.
I love how much of a time capsule this film is. After the Ukraine invasion, Moscow has been downgraded from cosmopolitan hub of international tourism, where you could plausibly shoot a medium motion picture, to pariah state where it’s illegal to even spend one dollar. This is not even like The Bourne Supremacy, there’s local talent in the cast and crew, it’s not just foreigners.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.