Much better than I expected.

Rating: 8/10 (5 April 2008)

30 Days of Night starts out with a fascinating introduction to its fascinating setting, Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost city in America. A quick look at Google earth with reveal this to be true  Barrow is very near Barrow Point, the northern tip of North America. I have a strange fascination with places like this. I'll probably never make it out there, but when I hear of places like that it always makes me want to visit them. For now, however, I'll have to settle for this vampire movie, which in many ways is better than average, but is less than average in many other ways.
Josh Hartnett plays the town Sheriff, Eben Oleson, who spends his days crossing the t's and dotting the i's of his job, often just keeping up the formalities or other times in order to make the citizens, even the ones living alone out in the frozen wilderness, remember that they are all part of the town. You see, it's a pretty quiet life that they lead up there in the far north.
Before long, however, some Strange Occurrences start taking place, with increasingly mysterious implications and circumstances, and then animals and people start turning up brutally killed. Structurally the film is pretty routine, but it's location adds a new element to the genre, and some of the photography is outstanding. There are a few aerial shots of the carnage, for example, some while the killing is actually taking place, which are some of the best shots I've ever seen in a vampire film.
Similarly, the vampires themselves are impressively performed, despite your occasional overacting. The special effects and make up come together for an impressive affect that reminds me of those unbelievably creepy Asian schoolgirls in that LFO music video called "Freak." I recommend it, it's crazy.
Before long, as is to be expected, you have a core group of the townspeople, the only survivors, we can presume, holed up somewhere sleeping in shifts, taking turns on watch out, rationing food, etc, and of course there is somewhere that "if they can reach it they'll have enough food to last a month." This has all been done who knows how many times, but there is something added to the personality of the vampires that I hadn't seen before.
There is an interesting hierarchy to them, they are stratified with a leader and his minions followed by I imagine an army of lower level vampires that obey orders. In order to achieve motive for the screenplay's need for the whole town to be exterminated, the leader actually makes a clever statement, telling his followers that it has taken them centuries to make people believe that they were just a bad dream, so the humans all had to be destroyed to prevent the escape of any eyewitnesses. Evidently he's unaware of the real world response that a group of people would get from the rest of America if they were to come forward and claim that a horde of vampires had wiped out the entire population of the country's northernmost city.
And one thing that I have to mention, the ending of the film (which is generally the worst part of most horror movies) is outstanding. Sheriff Oleson, in order to save the rest of the survivors, infects himself with vampire blood and then battles the vampires on his own before he fully transforms into one of them.
There is, of course, going to be the standard complaint that the sun doesn't "set" one day and then lead to 30 days of darkness, but I should think that such a thing is irrelevant to a movie like this. In reality, think of it like the sun rises lower and lower in the sky as winter approaches, finally doing sort of a ring along the horizon for some time during winter, at which time it's never really daytime and never really nighttime. I've always wanted to see that.
Although the movie is not without plot holes (there is an eerie shot of a ship ominously approaching the shore in the opening of the movie, which one of the vampires watches with some mixture of fascination and fear, and yet we never find out anything about it), the last shot in the movie is the perfect ending to the story, and the movie also, by the way, has what might be the most graphic beheading I've ever seen. If you're into that, don't miss this one!