Gary Oldman becomes Winston Churchill and shines a light on the horror of war

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2018)

It's worth seeing this film for Gary Oldman's realisation of Churchill alone. He looks, sounds and makes one forget it's not the original man in the frame.
It shows most of the first month in May 1940, when Churchill was thrust into the leadership of a government of national unity after Neville Chamberlain was thrown from the Prime Ministerial office, for leadership inaction and weakness . Churchill has to decide if attempting a peace treaty with Herr Hitler through then-neutral Mussolini was a better option than trying to stand firm, when his military position was hanging by a thread. The dilemmas faced, against the backdrop of the crumbling position his forces were in, gave me a clearer insight into what WW2 must have been like than many other representations.
The story presents other main characters such as Chamberlain and Halifax fairly shallowly in my view, possibly to enhance the perception of Churchill, or possibly because that is what they were like, which seems less likely given their political and military careers. I don't know how accurate the portrayal of other nations actions was, but Darkest Hour seemed to portray other countries fleetingly and their leaders as incompetent. I found a particular scene in the underground tube train just so twee and unlikely that for me it seemed a fabricated plot device to explain Churchill's about face to stand firm and defend their position when he had almost been convinced that a peace treaty was the only hope. We were told he had one stop to go yet spoke to those people for much longer than that - I was expecting a lost Churchill who had missed his station. But Churchill was well known for capturing and understanding the mood of the general public, and perhaps this is one method he used.
Kristen Scott Thomas was terrific as Churchill's wife Clementine, and Lily James was convincing as secretary Leighton. The way these people were treated jars now, but I daresay was true to the time. . The look and feel of the film captured the early 1940s effortlessly, particularly the parliamentary and war cabinet room scenes.