Not atrocious, but ends up in a corner and uses stupidity to get out.

Rating: 4/10 (1 June 2010)

This movie is like a mechanism that gets all wound up but ultimately has nowhere to go.
30 Days of Night tells the story of a vampire attack on the town of Barrow, Alaska, a community so close to the North Pole that every year they have darkness that lasts for an entire month. Sounds pretty appealing to you average bloodsucker, right? Anyway, the story begins with town sheriff Eban (Josh Harnett) investigating weird events around town and yes, his name is Eban. Why you'd bother calling him Eban when it sounds exactly like Evan is a mystery for the ages. Satellite phones are stolen and destroyed. All the sled dogs in town are brutally slaughtered. A stranger (Ben Foster) turns up in town, looking like he just crawled out of a sewer and talking crazy. Eban, with an assist from his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George), throws the stranger in jail. But then the power goes out and the vampires blitz the town. These aren't your sexy, pensive, frilly shirt wearing vampires, though. These are simple, animalistic creatures who look at humans the way humans look at cheeseburgers. The vamps massacre most of the town with ease, but Eban, Stella and a small group manage to hide in the attic of an empty house, knowing they've got 30 days until sunrise. Not all of them will survive that longand those that do will pay a heavy price.
Though the story makes some weak allusions to psychological suspense when the surviving humans are all stuck together in the attic, 30 Days of Night is really just a more complicated way of jumping out from behind a corner and yelling "Boo!" This isn't a story that flows organically from human (or vampire) behavior and emotion. I t is a mechanism designed to put the characters in the greatest peril possible. But like some other mechanism movies, this one is so smart it has to become stupid in order to work.
These characters are trapped in sub-zero weather, with limited food and water and super-strong, super-fast, virtually unkillable monsters prowling around trying to find them. The only way they can survive is to hide, but doing that should kill them after just a few days of cold, hunger and thirst. I suppose you could make a movie of that, but it wouldn't be the commercial horror movie 30 Days of Night want to be. T his film wants to entertain, but it's trapped its characters in a dead end with no reasonable way out. So the movie does what many other movies do in this situation...it gets stupid. The practical realities of how this group of people could survive in this situation are ignored. And because the movie doesn't want to spend an hour and a half with these people just sitting around in the attic, they have to start doing idiotic stuff to get them out of the attic and into danger. But because they don't want the movie to end in 10 minutes, the stupid stuff they do doesn't kill them (unless the plot dictates it's time for a character to die).
And speaking of stupid, I have to point out than the vampires end up covered in blood from their attacks on the townspeople. Yet, even though they spend a month walking around Barrow at sub-freezing temperature, they never wipe the blood off and it always stays wet. I would think that even vampires would have some concern for their personal hygiene, but I'm absolutely sure that blood not only dries but also freezes in cold weather.
30 Days of Night also has the other weakness common to mechanism movies in that, none of the actions taken by the characters have any real meaning or depth to them. One of the things you can do to make these kinds of films more gripping is to link the physical challenges facing the character to emotional challenges from other parts of their lives. For example, Eban and Stella are separated, apparently over the question of having children. Not to spoil things for you, but Eban has to make a dramatic decision at the end of the movie to save everyone else. If they could have linked that decision to the separation it would have been a much more powerful moment. The problem between he and Stella should have been connected in some way to the problem he has to solve to save everyone, so there's an emotional significance to his actions beyond servicing the Almighty Plot Hammer. Or the film could have focused on how these people all came to this desolate place to get away from other people and be alone, but now they desperately need other people in order to survive. But after dancing around that theme for a few seconds, it's forgotten.
I haven't read the comic books upon which this movie is based (and yes, they're comic books and not a graphic novel, you pretentious bastards), so I don't know if the problems with this film come from the source or are the product of adaptation. If you're a vampire fan and are looking for a different take on the subject, you might enjoy 30 Days of Night. But you'd better be ready to go along with the story when it stops being clever and starts being stupid.