A wasted opportunity

Rating: 4/10 (13 January 2018)

Just about everything is wrong with this effort which in the end retains one's attention mainly because one has seen Christopher Nolan's excellent Dunkirk.
This is supposed to be the political story behind Dunkirk. Winston Churchill was prime minister barely a month before Dunkirk happened.
And there probably still is a great story to tell there because Darkest Hour merely throws up what is well known in an almost comic book fashion. (For a far deeper look at it - and told by people who was in the British parliament then - see the appropriate episode of the documentary World At War.)
This movie starts out as a political biopic but halfway through loses focus and seems to become a C grade art movie with the Churchill character nervously "losing it" in the toilet and such other silly scenes.
Then the fibbing also starts. It has the main character doing "symbolic" deeds rooted in the artistic pretensions of the movie - unfortunately things that never actually happened (the train).
Joe Wright here had one of the most dramatic set of happenings in British history for probably a century or more.... why not stick to it?
Another matter that bothered one were the special effects like when the air journey to France was undertaken. Are the shots from the plane artistic shots that flopped or was is merely very badly made miniature props? It is unclear.
Gary Oldman plays Churchill and he makes a bit of a mess of it. Unfortunately for him one can go to YouTube and listen to Churchill's actual speeches. Oldman does not nearly get it right. Where the real Churchill sounds confident and calm Oldman's Churchill sounds scared and hysterical.
A movie that failed because the script was second grade and it started with history and then frantically seemed to want to become an art movie of sorts.