Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
10/25/07
Studio executives are all
about High Concepts: movie ideas that can be expressed in a single,
promotable catchphrase. Sadly, we often find ourselves sitting through
promotable catchphrases that take no more than fifteen minutes to prove
they could never be fleshed out into a successful story, or ones that don't
survive a second's rational analysis (no, I won't pay good money to learn
why Dane Cook didn't think that Jessica Alba couldn't marry the next man
she dated if she never stopped dating him). But every once in a while,
a movie comes along to restore your faith in these snappy little ideas.
For instance, “Vampires attack an Alaskan town during its' annual month
of total darkness.” 30 Days of Night is everything that pitch
promises and more: it's tense, scary and exciting in all the right
ways, and anybody who doesn't mind seeing its' hero have to take three
swings to fully sever a vamp's head with an ax should have a ball.
Fictional Barlow, Alaska
is the Northernmost town in the United States, and at one point each year
the sun hangs so low in the sky that it does not rise for an entire month.
This year is even colder than most for the Oleson family because husband-and-wife
Sheriffs Eben (Josh Hartnett) and Stella (Melissa George) are estranged.
Her plans to take the last plane out are ruined by a car accident, so she
arrives back in town just as a man known only as The Stranger (Ben Foster)
is arrested for a crime wave of vandalism (trashing satellite phones, killing
sled dogs) that effectively cuts the town off from the outside world.
The Stranger is an odd duck, but his warnings that “something is coming”
prove terrifyingly true when the power is cut and a pack of bloodthirsty
vampires led by Marlow (Danny Huston) savages the town. It's up to
Eben and Stella to lead an ever-shrinking group of survivors from hiding
place to hiding place as they try to puzzle out the nature of what they're
up against and find a way to survive 30 days of night.
Based on a graphic novel
by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith, 30 Days of Night wears its'
mission statement to put the horror back in cinematic vampires on its'
bloody sleeve. No Anne Rice existential crises here (Marlow does
say at one point that being a vampire is nothing but hunger and pain, but
good luck finding anybody who'll feel bad for these monsters): just
a pack of savage beasts who do speak amongst themselves, but not in English
(I'm guessing their subtitled language is Romanian, but that's just a guess).
Once they begin to feed, the vamps spend their month in the dark with ever-present
beards of dried blood caking their chins, shrieking like banshees at the
slightest smell of humanity. And forget about holy water, crosses,
and revoked invitations: in the absence of sunlight, the only thing
our heroes can do to stop these bloodsuckers is slice their heads off with
an ax. “Slice” might not actually be the right word, as it takes
repeated whacks to the neck to get the job done: 30 Days of Night
is
bloody as all get-out and proud of it. Directed David Slade keeps
the intensity level high by selecting an utterly irony-free tone that emphasizes
constant mortal danger above all else.
But the movie also has a
brain, one smart enough to keep the characters from getting too safe in
any of their hiding places without resorting to too much “I can't stand
it anymore, I have to endanger the group!” behavior. And the vampires
are as smart as they are vicious: it's suggested that this isn't
the first time they've sacked a town this way, and when the totality of
what they have planned becomes clear, it's an outstandingly efficient human
slaughtering mechanism. Slate makes good use of overhead photography
to lay out the geography of Barlow, and then to finish it off in a bravura
tracking shot that goes from street to street as dozens of citizens are
slaughtered by rampaging vamps.
Given a script high on intensity
and low on characterization, the cast fills in the gaps admirably.
Hartnett's All-American Boy appeal is aging nicely, and his recent performances
here and in Resurrecting the Champ
are among his best. He's totally convincing as someone the entire
town would turn to in a crisis. George provides a nicely lived-in
performance and has good, weary chemistry with her soon-to-be Ex.
The townspeople mostly do their job without registering much, although
Nathaniel Lees gets a tremendous speech about his own special reason to
not want to become a vampire, and hits it out of the park. Across
the board, the actors playing the vampires are effectively alien, and Huston
is an inspired choice to lead them. His Marlow (never named on-screen,
I assume the vamp names come from the graphic novel) is a unique cinematic
bloodsucker, urbane enough to seem like both a leader and a strategic thinker,
but also with his share of pure thuggery. Foster, who's making a
specialty this Fall of playing psycho henchmen, excels as the twitchy,
dangerous loser whose name we never learn. The film's opening shot
depicts him wandering away from a beached ship, and we are left to only
imagine the ghastly backstory he's leaving behind.
There's plenty of quality
work behind the scenes as well. Jo Willems' Cinematography keeps
the endless night imposing without ever making things hard to see, while
Brian Reitzell's memorably dissonant score jangled my nerves in all the
right ways. The Makeup team has constructed unique and scary vampires
and gone all-out with the decapitations. Having never read the graphic
novel, I don't know how much credit to give to its' writer Niles there
or to he and his screenwriting cohorts Stuart Beattie and Brian Nelson
for the adaptation, but the story builds to an impressive crescendo and
a finish that's rousing as all get-out.
30 Days of Night won't
make the world a better place, but it sure does deliver the fun and chills
one hopes for from a Halloween horror release. In doing so, it accomplishes
one of Hollywood's most elusive goals: fulfilling the promise of
awesomeness made by one hell of a snappy High Concept. |
