The Bullet Music Reviews

Film review: 30 Days of Night

Plot

As the inhabitants of Barrow, a small town in Alaska, make their arrangements for the impending month of darkness by boarding up their houses and flying south, sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) is left in charge of the town during this forbidding time. His estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) is forced to stay behind because she missed the last helicopter out of town. What promises to be a dire month anyway is made worse by mysterious and macabre occurrences: a mound of molten mobile phones is found and all dogs in town are viciously killed. Someone is doing their best to make contact with the outside world impossible. This someone turns out to be The Stranger (a creepy and unrecognizable Ben Foster) who believes himself to be in league with a gang of vampires who consider feasting on people in a town that is cut off from everything and everyone during a month where the sun does not come out like shooting fish in a barrel. They are partially right, but they have not reckoned with the remaining townfolk who come out swinging.

30 Days of Night has a few things going for it that should have made it a vampire flick to raise the hairs on the back of neck: its inspired and nearly-but-not-quite-true-to-life premise for one, or the look of the vampires which are like no other vampires you ever saw (or heard), or the fact that Sam Raimi produced it. The movie looks and sounds phenomenal. The despair, forlornness and cold are tangible; music is kept to a bare minimum, with only the howling winds and shrieks of the vampires making the blood run cold in your veins.

Acting

Unfortunately, it has many more things working against it. Hartnett’s wooden acting is a case in point. I applaud him for his choice to do this bleak and austere movie but he is far from suited to this kind of role, which requires a certain maturity and introspection he visibly lacks. Ben Foster, on the other hand, is a far more talented but less well-known actor, playing a filthy, conniving but ambitious madman with relish and gusto.

If this were the first vampire or even horror movie you ever saw, you would consider 30 Days of Night a masterpiece and you would jump in your seat every few seconds. The truth is that despite some originality, seasoned moviegoers have seen it all before: the little innocent girl with her back to the camera whom someone approaches to see if they can help... The vampires claiming that it is a good thing that no one believes in them anymore since it means that the world is their oyster... The order in which the townspeople die: if you bemoan your lot the loudest and walk out 'because you have had enough of this', the sooner you get killed off... Some people in the audience got the giggles, including me, and they were only exacerbated by the unintentionally funny gory moments underlined by squishing and squelching noises. Let’s face it: if you see one vampire ripping the throat out of a man, you’ve seen them all. 30 Days of Night’s cop-out is that it tries to be a psychological thiller behind all the bloodletting, attempting to answer the age-old questions, 'What would you do if your town was overrun by blood-thirsty beasts?' and 'Since my estranged wife happens to be here fighting alongside me, what are the chances of us falling in love with each other all over again?' Yeah, what are the chances indeed... In a movie like 30 Days of Night, those chances are astronomical. The Olesons even take their sweet time to chatter about family life and marriage as the vampires are approaching. Good on them; not good for the audience who by this point are rolling their eyes and wondering if they can still make it to the pub for last orders.

Verdict: All in all, you will not regret seeing this movie. It’s a pleasant, funny and gory experience and you will hide your eyes behind your hands once or twice. The problem is that it does not linger, apart from the unintentionally humourous bits.

Patty