Steve Casting with a Twist. The culture is always fodder and all politics all the time makes Johnny chop a hole in the bathroom door with an axe. So here’s a different flavor of Audio Pod-casting juice for your thirsty ears. A Red Box movie review: The Darkest Hour.
Notes:
Thanks for your continued patience as I try to fine tune the end product. FireFox 13.0.1 users may not be able to see this audio player–just follow this link instead. If you’d rather read the transcript you may do so on the jump.
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Red Box is the defining measure of modern Cinema’s value, at least for me. Is it worth $1.50 (for Blue Ray, less for DVD) and two hours of my life? Surprisingly, or perhaps not so much, very little that comes out these days is worth those two hours–the $1.50 is still a matter of some debate. But sometimes I am intrigued enough by a trailer to ignore the haters who have panned the latest piece of trash to emerge from the Entertainment Industry, and I rent it anyway. (For the record, with a few exceptions, even movies I suspect are good get the Red Box treatment because Hollywood does not deserve my hard earned money and certainly not while most of them are advocating for the government to engage in more and broader forms of legal plunder. I went to see The Avengers this year. I might go see the Spider man Reboot.
So what about the damn movie Steve? This weekend I picked up ‘The Darkest Hour,’ which I have to admit I enjoyed. Watching people reduced to CGI dust, and watching that one remaining footless sneaker drop to the concrete, is kind of cool (although one of my boys panned it because a dog gets smoked in the Middle of Moscow and he didn’t like that.). But most importantly learned something critical about apocalyptic alien invasion movies involving Americans stuck in Moscow. If you are Russian and you don’t speak any English, your odds of surviving go way down.
The story is simple. A pair of young American software entrepreneurs–one the uptight genius, the other the easy going rouge–arrive in Moscow to pimp their Smart Phone App only to discover a slimy Swedish ‘partner’ has stolen the idea and probably the sale. With nothing left to do they decide to look for an American girl who used their International Club finder to look for local hot spots. They find her with a blond friend sporting something like an English accent, encounter the slimy Swede in the same club and then find themsleves thrust together after mysterious glowing blobs of energy descend into the city and begin turning everyone into dust.
Our protagonists survive by hiding in a basement store room but eventually have to venture out and look for other survivor, food, and some fragment of hope. The city is a ghost town. Proceed to the sneak around dodging aliens, finding surviving locals who all speak passable English, discovering that these things are feeding on Human bio-energy while they begin mining the earths ample mineral resources, and discover that they can in fact fight back.
Add basic lessons in how electricity works, Farady cages, microwave emitters, and a radio whose message informs them that there is an almost impossible to get to Russian sub in the river collecting survivors by a specific deadline–and a Russian resistance movement determined to stay and fight to the end, but willing to help our American friends find a way to the sub and you’ve got the story.
And it gets better as it goes.
Important lesson number two. The more uptight the character the more likely they are to die.
Spoiler alert.
There are no sex scenes, and not one kiss is exchanged, even after the survivors are on the Russian sub. But it ends on a note of hope. We can fight back, we are, and we’ll probably win, so all you future Adam’s and Eve’s get ready to re-populate the earth.
Am I glad I skipped the theater on this one.? Given my low threshold, of course. But is it worth 89 minutes of your life and the change from your sofa? Yes. The effects are cool, the dialogue isn’t that bad, and you might actually care what happens to a few of the characters before it ends.
