Don't Be Short-Changed By Personality Over Character

Rating: 9/10 (19 January 2008)

There's a quote I recently read by the author W. Somerset Maugham. "When you choose your friends, don't be short-changed by choosing personality over character." 30 Days of Night seems to have been made by and will likely be enjoyed the most by people who have not read this quote or have come to a conclusion relative to Maugham's. However, can you blame them so much? This film appears to be a ground-breaker in its own right. It has some of the most striking and beautifully Gothic cinematography I have ever seen. It is so bleak in a way that is somehow inventive. I've never seen a film before this that has looked this way or similarly enough to it to be reminiscent. The photography is no doubt the film's most valuable quality.
It's the film's look that gives it's small-town Alaska setting such atmosphere, such an all- consuming limitation that makes it feel so cut off from the rest of America. Would anyone here in Cincinnati find it plausible that vampires could take the town over? Surely somehow they could be overpowered. Not in this town, which is given a spotlit weakness by its wondrously atmospheric appearance in this film.
Even if it's hard to believe that with a well-populated town, vampires intelligent enough to have Danny Huston as a leader would rampage and kill everybody rather than rounding them up and feed to their satisfaction, the relentlessness of the vampires and their unyielding ruthlessness accompanied by the filmmakers' willingness to stay with scenes of horrible torture, screaming, brutality, and depressingly sad scenes of gore, and how little the script cares to let minor characters go, and go in merciless ways only those who've survived some of the world's most horrific atrocities will feel they've seen any semblance of in witnessing death before, gives the film great intensity and suspense. But if it only could not go limp on us in the last 20 minutes, when the screenwriters, instead of climbing off for a smoke break, simply ran out of breath and let the pounding get weaker and drone on till the satisfied but rather flimsy finish.
Those last twenty minutes or so haven't the meaning or effort as such dense tissue like the rest of the movie up till then, even though the entire time it's rather difficult to overlook how characters can hide from their relentless predators when every step should make a footprint in the snow, when it tapers off into implausibility in the context of its own creative license, not to mention silly American tough-guy-going-down-and-taking-as- many-of-them-with-me-as-I-can gimmickry. (For example, injecting oneself with vampire blood is a completely pointless act when it's fifteen minutes before sun-up.) Nonetheless, I still somehow did not leave this film reflecting upon it with such bad taste in my mouth. I don't look at it as a ground-breaker and certainly not a contemporary classic, but the inspired stylistic intensity in the film-making, responsibility for which can be taken by director David Slade, who also directed the seamless, criminally overlooked gem of a thriller Hard Candy, will hopefully be built upon with Slade's following efforts.