DARKEST HOUR

“You cannot reason with a tiger when your head is in its mouth.”

In all honesty, Darkest Hour wasn’t the film I was expecting to start 2018 off with, but as things rarely go as planned, here we are. But seeing as I’m a History nerd, I was always going to watch it at some point. And I’m glad I did.

Darkest Hour follows Winston Churchill through his first weeks of being Prime Minister during World War 2. While that sounds like a far too simple plot, given the events that unfolded, such as the fall of Europe and the recently re-told scenes at Dunkirk, those were no ordinary first few weeks. Something that this style of plot allows for is immense focus on certain days, and it’s something the film utilises to the full. There will be half hour or more segments, which is a surprisingly long time for a film, that will focus solely on a single day. This acts as quite an impressive display of just how long those few days felt to those who lived them, and it helps the film dramatically. It doesn’t flash through the War like an 80s montage with fast music in the background. It takes its time to explore the important stuff, and it’s all the better for it.

Of course, the biggest stand-out of the film is the fact that Winston Churchill is played by Gary Oldman.

Now this might seem normal for an actor, but coming out of the cinema, I had the revelation that the same man looked like this in the Harry Potter films, and it blew my mind

a little bit…

Quite the change of appearance…

Oldman’s performance is nothing short of spectacular throughout, and his capture of Churchill’s ways and mannerisms didn’t go un-noticed. In fact, Oldman won his first Golden Globe for the role and it couldn’t be more well-deserved. His performance is both mesmerising and funny in places I wasn’t expecting, which helped break the otherwise – and rightly so – bleaker tones of the film. Not only did he shine in the films smaller moments, which make up a more than expected amount of it’s run-time, but his delivery of Churchill’s well-known speeches – among them the ‘Fight them on the beaches’ speech – was almost uncanny.

While the rest of the cast does a very good job in their roles, with quite a large number of familiar faces if you’ve watched the right things in the past, Oldman’s performance is by far the stand out. That being said, the accuracy of the higher-class accent of the time was spot on across the board, with Ben Mendelsohn’s performance as King George VI being a strong showcase of this.

The amount of ‘r’ s pronounced as ‘w’s was surprisingly accurate for a film…

All in all, Darkest Hour was a surprisingly good first watch of 2018 for me. I like History and World War 2 in particular, so perhaps it’s just my personal bias, but I really don’t think it is. Its focus on the day to day life of Winston Churchill as Britain stood on the edge of extinction was a plot that I wasn’t sure would work, but in the end, did, and Oldman’s performance did more than help that. The film was funny in places I wasn’t expecting and the humour, perhaps because of it’s rather English nature, almost always landed on the right foot. The film’s smaller moments, including a particular favourite of mine set on the London Underground, mixed with some of the time’s most historic moments blended almost perfectly to create a film I look forward to watching again. If you’re not a History nerd like me, chances are that you probably won’t find as much enjoyment in it as I did, but give it a watch anyway, you’ll be glad you did.