2008 Woodie Awards
'30 Days of Night' compiles traits of hollywood's best vampire flicks
By: Phil Hornshaw
Issue date: 10/22/07 Section: Lifeline
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The visual style of "30 Days of Night" is particularly striking, even from the first frame.
The vast cold of Alaska coupled with purposely dark, underexposed shots gives the whole film a foreboding look. Then the various murders start, and "30" steps up its game.
It calls to mind some of the best moments from the early parts of Zack Snyder's 2003 "Dawn of the Dead" - a city under siege, monsters tearing people from their homes, people disappearing into bloody holes and pitch black crawlspaces.
"30" opens with a series of strange vandalisms taking place in the small town of Barrow, Ala. - the northernmost town in the country. There, the rotation of the earth leaves the town under darkness for a full month each year.
A mysterious stranger (Ben Foster, "3:10 to Yuma") appears in the town about this time and is promptly arrested for being generally menacing by local sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett, "Lucky Number Slevin").
The stranger mutters some things about evil coming. The audience starts to realize the town is completely cut off. It's a decent set-up, and though some of the vampires look a little stupid, most are pretty spooky, with their big black eyes and a mouthful of fangs.
They easily tear the 152 people left in Barrow into little pieces, with the small exclusion of Eben, his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George, "The Amityville Horror") and brother Jake (Mark Rendall, "Silk"), along with very few others.
Showing several characters' inevitable shuffling loose of the mortal coil via vampiric mayhem works pretty well, but the fact of filming a town getting eaten also weakens a lot of the pull of the main characters.
The downfall of "30" is a series a storytelling blunders. Essentially, we're left wondering how a lot of things happened.
More than once, Hartnett goes running out into vampire territory, only to show up wherever he's going unscathed. Wait - wasn't the whole point of hiding, which is all the characters do for much of the movie, that the vampires easily run down and kill anyone who was outside?
The vast cold of Alaska coupled with purposely dark, underexposed shots gives the whole film a foreboding look. Then the various murders start, and "30" steps up its game.
It calls to mind some of the best moments from the early parts of Zack Snyder's 2003 "Dawn of the Dead" - a city under siege, monsters tearing people from their homes, people disappearing into bloody holes and pitch black crawlspaces.
"30" opens with a series of strange vandalisms taking place in the small town of Barrow, Ala. - the northernmost town in the country. There, the rotation of the earth leaves the town under darkness for a full month each year.
A mysterious stranger (Ben Foster, "3:10 to Yuma") appears in the town about this time and is promptly arrested for being generally menacing by local sheriff Eben (Josh Hartnett, "Lucky Number Slevin").
The stranger mutters some things about evil coming. The audience starts to realize the town is completely cut off. It's a decent set-up, and though some of the vampires look a little stupid, most are pretty spooky, with their big black eyes and a mouthful of fangs.
They easily tear the 152 people left in Barrow into little pieces, with the small exclusion of Eben, his estranged wife Stella (Melissa George, "The Amityville Horror") and brother Jake (Mark Rendall, "Silk"), along with very few others.
Showing several characters' inevitable shuffling loose of the mortal coil via vampiric mayhem works pretty well, but the fact of filming a town getting eaten also weakens a lot of the pull of the main characters.
The downfall of "30" is a series a storytelling blunders. Essentially, we're left wondering how a lot of things happened.
More than once, Hartnett goes running out into vampire territory, only to show up wherever he's going unscathed. Wait - wasn't the whole point of hiding, which is all the characters do for much of the movie, that the vampires easily run down and kill anyone who was outside?
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