Being nearly as old as motion pictures themselves, vampire movies seem to always try and do something new and different in order to win over an audience. Filmmakers always seem to be on the lookout for a new hook to attract people to these movies. Enter 30 Days of Night, a vampire movie based on the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith.
The story's hook is that vampires come to destroy a town in northern Alaska, a town so far north that every winter it experiences 30 full days without the sun. Thus, the vampires have free rein of the town without having to worry about any pesky sunlight raining down on them.
Directed by David Slade (Hard Candy) and starring Josh Hartnett and Melissa George, 30 Days of Night, while an interesting concept, fails to truly deliver on excitement. Outside of its new and different hook, the film is nothing more than a series of clichéd storylines and lacks a villain of any depth or substance.
Hartnett is at the movie's center, as Eben Oleson, sheriff of the town of Barrow, and George is his estranged wife, Stella, who has moved away. Due to her job, Stella ends up returning to Barrow and then, due to bad luck, misses the last plane out before the place shuts down for the month without daylight.
Eben, Stella, and a rag-tag group manage to survive the initial vampire onslaught and end up trying to find creative ways to save other townsfolk and themselves over the course of the next 30 days.
Again, it's a decent enough, if generic, idea, but the film seems to lack any internal sense of logic. Cell phones are stolen and destroyed prior to the takeover (by a man who is aiding and abetting the vamps), but the power is cut anyway, rendering the cell phones useless even if they did exist. Why the plane in and out of the town stops flying during the 30 days of night is also never explained (planes seem to do okay in the dark), and why our heroes simply can't drive the 80 miles to the next outpost of humanity is also never discussed. Presumably a reason does exist, but said reason never makes it into the film.
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