Has anyone heard anything regarding Chris Gorak’s The Darkest Hour? I mean, anything? The sci-fi thriller opens on Christmas Day, and neither trailers nor commercials are lighting up our Internet. There isn’t a press screening to be found. Perhaps Summit Entertainment (understandably) feels Hour will be swallowed up by muscular holiday releases like War Horse, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and The Adventures of Tintin? Either way, the Darkest Hour campaign had been deathly quiet. Then, a viral video reportedly created on behalf of the film reached our offices. Watch a reporter get fried by electricity … sort of:



Yeesh. Does that not look like the worst bit of green screen you’ve seen in a while? And that acting? Oh man. If this is the level of special effects that audiences are going to get in Darkest Hour, who can blame them for paying to see Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol instead? I mean, Tom Cruise outruns a Kremlin fireball, and The Darkest Hour gives us a stunt that looks like something you could do for $10 in a theme park. Terrible.

I had hopes for the science-fiction flick, which stars Emile Hirsch, Olivia Thirlby and Max Minghella as survivors of an alien attack who band together in Moscow to ward off invaders who are using our planet’s power supply to take us down from within. It had a very good chance to be the guilty-pleasure counterprogramming of the holiday season. But there was nothing pleasurable about that viral video, and the rest of the film remains a mystery for now.