'THE DARKEST HOUR'....TOO BAD THESE ALIENS DIDN'T ZAP PUTIN WHILE THEY WERE AT IT......

 The Darkest Hour (2011)    I never got around to wasting a precious 90 minutes on this when it first came out.....it looked so dopey, generic and inconsequential......

             But given it depicts an alien apocalypse in the heart of Moscow, and it since it recently popped up on Hulu, what can I say? I wasted 90 precious minutes on it......

            Three big pluses..... first, .it does stand out by shlepping a quartet of American millennials over to Russia, just in time for invisible aliens to float down into Moscow, zapping everybody into dust with frickin' lightning bolts....

              Second, the film moves its ass at the kind of furious pace you'd expect from a movie like this.

             Third,  there's a whole load of fascinating shots of these desperate survivors fleeing through all sorts of Russian landmarks, including the massive GUM Department store, which looks like you could fly planes in and out of it. 

             What's fascinating here is the peculiar period of Russian history this movie falls into.....communism's gone bye-bye, and movies now feel free to portray the country as sort of a new version of the American Wild West.....outlaws, gangs, hard-partying and plenty of McDonald's franchises if you crave a Big Mac with your borscht . 

              Ah, but what a difference 12 years makes.......with war criminal Putin returning the place to its evil, USSR roots and making the country a world wide pariah......ruled by a rat-faced, pseudo  Bond villain who slaughters women and children.....well, because he can. 

               But let us return to the simpler era of "The Darkest Hour", which even includes a host of Russian actors in supporting, heroic roles......and anyone who's seen at least two or three alien invasion movies can easily predict every cheeseball plot turn. (Not that doesn't make the movie any less fun to sit through....)

                Can these zappity-zappin' electric creatures be thwarted?  Oh come on, you know they can.....and you can probably take fairly accurate guesses as to which cast members end up dust-to-dust and which ones survive the fade-out unzapped. 

               If Hulu or the producers of this film really wanted to refurbish it into an all new crowd-pleaser, they should insert a mid-credits Marvel-type teaser at the end......with Vlad the impaler meeting with his generals, moments before the the aliens ZAP them into oblivion.

               Now that's what BQ calls a happy ending. But even without it, the film's still a moderately amusing sci-fi guilty pleasure for all alien-invasion completists...2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2)