Common Sense Observations

Movie review of 30 Days of Night, 2007

DAMIEN’S RATING of Days of Night: 5 – This movie establishes where mediocrity starts and ends. Nobody will hate this movie (probably), but nobody will love it, either.

See the complete movie rating system here.

Days of Night reviewed in 25 words or less: Another vampire flick – not much new here except the town where it takes place has a night that’s 30 days long.

FULL REVIEW of Days of Night

30 Days of Night is a vampire movie – and to be honest, I’m not a big fan of the genre. Mind you, I’ve seen them all – starting with the old Bela Lugosi movies all the way through the Twilight saga and everything in-between. I admit that, in my early childhood, Lugosi’s 1931 Dracula did cause me to suffer some sleepless nights.

30 Days of Night stars Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster, Mark Boone Junior and Mark Rendall. Despite the fact that I personally enjoy Josh Hartnett, I admit this is hardly a stellar cast. 30 Days of Night was directed by David Slade.

30 Days of Night takes place in Barrow, Alaska – the northernmost city in the United States. Every year, the town experiences a final sundown that leads to a night lasting – you guessed it – for 30 days. Vampires send their minion, very deftly played by Ben Foster, into Barrow to shut down communications and eliminate all means of travel out of the city – including dog sleds by killing all the sled dogs in town. Then the vampires arrive and feast on the trapped inhabitants.

The idea of giving the vampires the edge by having 30 Days of Night take place in a city which has 30 days of darkness is pretty clever – though it does come with some pitfalls. For example, how do 152 people (many of whom are old or children) reasonably fend off a band of hungry, bloodthirsty vampires for a full 30 days.

Here are some other problems I had with 30 Days of Night: Why did Hartnett’s character have to have asthma? It wasn’t used as a plot device anywhere in the movie. • If these vampires consume human blood for sustenance, why did they leave so very much of it splattered all over the place? If I ate like that, I’d starve – and cleanups would take hours. • It’s clearly shown in the end of the movie that these vampires have very heightened senses of smell. So how did the small group of survivors manage to successfully hide for so many days in an attic (which one review mistakenly calls a cellar)? This was, after all, a very small town. • Since there was still power in the utilidoor (sp?), and Hartnett discovered that his grandmother’s grow lights would kill the vampires, why didn’t he grab one of them before exiting her house?

30 Days of Night was well filmed and edited and the actors did okay with what they had to work with. If you’re a fan of the vampire movie genre, you’ll no doubt want to add this one to your list of viewed vampire flicks. Otherwise, this may well not be the movie for you.