Cranky T-Rex's Blog

Well now that Darkest Hour has gotten a few Oscar nods, I realized I neglected to put the review up over here at the blog.  It's doubly unfortunate I forgot since this was definitely one of my more anticipated films of the year, for all the reasons that it got Oscar nominations in the first place. I mean, Gary Oldman playing Winston Churchill? Where could you possibly go wrong with that?  That's like Daniel Day-Lewis playing Abraham Lincoln, which is probably why everyone immediately started comparing this movie to Lincoln in the first place. Unfortunately, I didn't enjoy this nearly as much as I thought I would, but I can tell you it did absolutely earn some of those Oscar nominations.  Let's talk about which parts of Darkest Hour worked, and which didn't:

One of these things is not like the other. RoboCop continues the tradition of rebooting franchises and not giving us the common courtesy of some form of subtitle so that we can differentiate between the new one and the old one. Seems like filmmakers hope that by sticking to the original name they can completely overwrite the original so that nobody remembers how much better it was. Fortunately, in this version Alex Murphy becomes a black cyborg with a single organic white hand so I can refer to him as RoboJackson and anyone who’s old enough to remember the 80s will get the joke. RoboJackson is about everything except this Alex Murphy guy who gets turned into a cyborg and the family that has to live with that new reality. It’s about drones, corporate greed, businesses in bed with government, modern news coverage, and did I mention drones? It’s like the filmmakers saw all the wonderful satire of the original film and felt like if they didn't stuff this one full of social co...