The Darkest Dawn

I think that 20 years of POV films is enough. The human race is about to disappear and the girl has cold blood to record every single passage of her day. On the other hand the script is nothing new and the film is too dark. It's difficult to say anything good about this dull movie.

This movie popped in my feed suddenly, with an intriguing description buried in the Thrillers section. For some reason it was either not listed or hidden in the Sci-Fi section, where on top I found a film called "Hungerford" with the tag "Teen Screams" that completely turned me off.

this film had an intriguing enough storyline and setup, and the main character Chloe was actually fun to watch and listen to. The film didn't bother with much in the way of build-up, as we're very quickly thrown into the main plot of "alien invasion" and we start with an almost red herring-esque tease of Chloe and her sister Sam shacking up in a tunnel with a very erratic and traumatized man who is prone to fits of rage and anger, but for whom Chloe and Sam depend upon for food and water.

The only other comparison to this type of setup I could think of was "10 Cloverfield Lane" but we are almost as quickly dissuaded from this by the arrival of a gang of snappy young men, including one named Cowen who behaves with such unusual and ill-timed élan that it was not even remotely shocking for me to discover the actor playing him also wrote and directed the film. The focus of the film is not on him long enough to make him out as a Mary Sue, but while he wasn't an unlikeable character, he was definitely among the least interesting of the group, while having significantly more camera time than the other least interesting character, Kipper.

Once this group gets together, the film starts to go through tropes and clichés without mercy, including the blatantly obvious "kid calling for help turns out to be an ambush" and the "lost group of soldiers with a woke commander who turn out to be bastards" that was more than just a little eerily reminiscent of the middle-end section of 28 Days Later.

Throughout it all, Chloe films everything and occasionally turns the camera on herself to narrate the events to her mother, who went out to work on the morning of the alien invasion and presumably is not coming back. These interludes don't have the same vim and vigor of the prologue camera monologues, which leads to an odd sort of attempt to contrast it that only makes it a bit weird.

Chloe was very happy, charismatic, and upbeat in the camera scenes before the big plot event happens, and, recognizing that a post-apocalyptic survival experience would be deeply traumatic and depressing to witness from the point of view of a 16 year old girl breaking down in front of us on camera, they decide that Chloe goes through these camera interludes with upbeat optimism much of the time.

Except that, for whatever reason, they don't seem to consider the events that unfold with regards to her tone. It's very understandable that she should be in good spirits for the first few camera monologues, but she also maintains that tone of cautious optimism even immediately after stabbing someone to death. It feels like something that was badly edited or else ill-conceived.

As a whole, the film was rather average and not very memorable, aside from Chloe. Apart from that, what makes this film more memorable to me is that, going back to the Sci-Fi section on Netflix, I saw "Hungerford" again, and realized that was a name used in this film repeatedly. Then I re-read the description and saw the name "Cowen" in it. Then I realized this movie is a "sequel" to "Hungerford" and without Chloe, I cannot imagine suffering through a movie led and narrated by Cowen. As I say that, I start watching the movie anyway.

Absolutely some of the worst acting ever. It's just too distracting from what could have been a somewhat enjoyable movie. The dialog is simple-minded and completely unrealistic, bordline art school cheesiness.

So many positive reviews here on IMDb I thought I have to give it a try but I was sceptic because most positive reviews came from the UK. And the trailer looked promising too so I tried to watch this low budget flick.

London has fallen into the hands of aliens so it's up to two sisters to survive the attack. The first 10 minutes looked great and even as it shows that the effects were CGI due the shaky cams and the attack it looked rather above mediocre. But once they ran from London they go out into the countryside. And from there on this flick falls like London just did.

It's waiting until the last 15 a 20 minutes before the real action comes back in with another space ship coming around. Being a bit of a found-footage I can understand the use of shaky cams and distorted images due the alien signals. But what the hell was that in between the two attacks. The fast forward was close in hands.

Promising beginning, rather boring and a great ending makes it simply hard to watch. Even as you could see it was made with addiction and dedication to the genre the limited budget destroyed the flick.

Gore 0/5 Nudity 0/5 Effects 2/5 Story 1,5/5 Comedy 0/5

This got 5 star reviews on Netflix and I'm honestly not sure why. Terrible, over acting - if you can call it acting. Situation escalates quickly, unbelievably so. I've seen better acting in at my local youth theatre.