Starts good enough, sets along the way

Rating: 5/10 (31 October 2007)

"30 Days of Night" has an intriguing title and an intriguing premise - that of bloodthirsty vampires roaming a little Alaskan town where the sun won't rise during a 30-day stretch. And director David Slade, working on a script by Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson, from the graphic novel of Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, manages to build tension early in the film with this discourse.
Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) is a sheriff investigating a series of strange crimes in the isolated town of Barrow, Alaska, such as the burning of stolen cellphones and butchering of sleigh dogs. His estranged wife Stella (Melissa George) is in town for a fire inspection but missed her flight out just before the town is set for a month-long winter without the sun. Soon, they find themselves in the midst of a violent frenzy of hungry vampires.
As said before, it all starts promising enough. But then the film takes a disappointing turn somewhere along the way. The tension dissipates when Slade focuses on the handful of survivors as they try to survive the 30 days until the sun finally begins to rise. The plot becomes barely non-existent. Granted, it would be rather harsh to expect of a more intricate storyline for a film of this nature; but there's neither a sense of urgency nor a sense of sympathy for the characters as in, say, Zack Snyder's reworking of "Dawn of the Dead." And unfortunately, a bulk of the film is intent on focusing on them. The vampires can repetitively snarl only so much before they start to lose their intimidating factor.
The only time the film regains its emotional bearing is towards the end, with a beautiful shot of Eben and Stella against a backdrop of a rising sun. But it would have to take a long time to get there.