Chliched, dull and unpleasant

Rating: 2/10 (30 October 2007)

The idea is good. I have to give them that. Vampires can only hunt at night so they choose to go to a place that goes a whole month without daylight, a small Alaskan town of a couple of hundred inhabitants. The film is nicely directed, the cast is decent. I don't like Josh Hartnett, but since i saw Slevin, i was more than wiling to see how he'd go about a horror movie. So really the base is there, but i just found the whole thing terribly boring and predictable. It indulges itself in violence, and everything in this film other than a whole month for vampires to go on a rampage (which is an adaption as far as i'm aware) has been done before. The vampires costumes look like those in Blade, there is a man eating child, like interview with the vampire, for some reason still speaking in English rather than the pathetic vampire dialect the others seem to prefer, and then turns to screaming just when you would expect her to. There is the obvious collaborator who, while in a prison cell tells the know-it-all police officer JH that everyone is going to die, but alas no one believes him, other than hero Josh's winy brother (who of course overcomes his fear of basically everything later on in the film) Now, while idea behind the storyline is really quite cool i think, the plot itself is shallow as. It's essentially Josh Hartnett kicking ass with the one or two mess-ups which have to be sorted out by one of his companions. And while the film is fairly quick and you won't be left waiting for blood for long once the story got going, the plot is dead slow. The film is about a month of sheer agony, fear and desperation for the people in that town, in which every day can be their last. The film gives you a time frame by showing the days that have passed since the vampires came to town and the sun disappeared. Now the gaps between these are ridiculous. At one point there is a 10 day gap between the last day shown and the one it's about now. Not even a vague idea is given where the vampires come from, (even from dusk till dawn tried that). Actually you cannot even say for sure if they actually are vampires. Of course they have the characteristics, drinking blood, afraid of light etc, but the word vampire is never mentioned once. So technically, if you have never heard of vampires before watching this, you would have no idea what's going on. Now while that is fairly unrealistic to assume about anyone, i reckon it is kind of important for a film to be able to stand for itself. The single most annoying thing though, which eventually ruined the whole film completely for me was the ending. It makes no sense. The 'day' before the sun comes up again, our hero Josh makes a last stand against the vampires in order to save his girl while the whole town is in flames, by injecting vampire blood(..), turning himself into a semi-vampire, who can smell human blood and is not attacked by other vampires, but doesn't have the urge to kill and drink blood. Now how he knows that doesn't become evident, it is simply fed to the audience, that this is the only chance they have (while i guess waiting for a couple of hours till the sun comes up would have done the trick itself). So Josh kills the uber vampire, while the others don't try to stop him and simply walks back to his pals sitting in the dark. He then looks at his last sunrise together with his girl, and turns to ashes. And that's it. Now how much can you criticise a film like this for not being logical, unrealistic or far fetched? My two favourite vampire films are From Dusk Till Dawn and Interview With a Vampire, obviously for completely different reasons. FDTD makes a perfect example of how to make a splatter comedy without taking itself seriously for a single moment. IWAV takes itself very seriously, but vampires are more of a medium to ask deeper questions, especially what it would be like to live forever. 30 Days of Night however tries to be a horror movie yet it cannot live up to anything that's been done before on a similar topic, given its shallow plot, its unbelievable main character and far too many question marks rising while watching it. The idea behind the story, as i've said before, is cool, but - unfortunately - the rest simply sucks.