Review of Darkest Hour (2017) by Mrdr4Gon — 29 Jan 2018

Darkest Hour is a film that missed its true calling as a Sunday afternoon TV movie. It certainly plays like it was created for television, with the lack of any real visualization of the script other than pointing the camera at the actors and having them wave their arms around as they speechify or proving a hindrance that massively tests a person's patience and willingness to pay attention. Another cinematographic grievance is the film constantly using dolly shots whenever it's not just people standing talking in a room, which isn't anything you notice immediately but it's definitely annoying after a while.

The cast is OK other than Oldman, who's legitimately great turn as a fat, balding, alcoholic Michael Caine is one of the better interpretations of Churchill being performed on screen. The film feels very fluid and almost jaunty at first but it does drag on way too long, the whole screenplay doesn't really have any excuse for how uninteresting it manages to be with its material because it's based on some of the most dramatic events in history. The little touches of cliche that permeate the mess of storytelling created, such at the random interest in Churchill's typist so that we don't feel like he's spending the entire film talking to himself, or the vilification of Neville Chamberlain and Lord Halifax, in order to give the film an actual antagonist, drive me up the wall. Maybe I'm being harsh on the film because Churchill might have actually been very personable with his typist and maybe Chamberlain/Halifax were horrible for the war effort post-Chamberlain's resignation, but honestly that'd be worse for my judgment of this film, because it makes me inherently doubt it's own historicity purely on the basis of it making plausibly historical elements feel cliche.

A few other elements rubbed me the wrong way. There's a scene where Churchill literally decides the fate of the country on polling random strangers on the London underground, which must be the most cringeworthy scene in the history of film. It feels like the writer(s) of this film ran out of ways to perpetuate the themes of the script, so came up with some outlandishly hamfisted way of getting the point across that blows any pretence of realism out of the water. This movie somehow had me on the side of the people that history proved wrong, just on the basis that they were the ones that made the best arguments in the script. I think that's a bit of a problem if you're supposedly making a film based on true events, to be perfectly honest.

Also, as an aside, I hate the cliche that this movie also revels in of historical films about famous people where they get eureka moments off of some offhandedly mentioned dialogue to come up with what they're most known for instead of them just doing so out of long arduous thought. It's kind of insulting to the intelligence.

Despite all of this, I can't say I hated the movie as a whole, Oldman is great in this, there's a few interesting or well created scenes and a couple of small laughs here and there, and I didn't feel like I'd completely wasted my time. So there's that.