Originally, I gave the movie 2/5 Stars, but I think that was too much and I’ve officially taken another star away from the movie. It truly blows.
THE ORIGINAL REVIEW
Producer Sam Raimi brings audiences “30 Days of Night”, based on the graphic novel by Stephen Niles. Josh Hartnett and the other surviving residents of Barrow, Alaska, must survive the month while trying to evade elusive vampires for… well… 30 days of… um, you know… night.
The film looks good and it does what I was beginning to think was impossible these days: they made vampires scary again. There are a few moments in the film where the vampires truly make the audience jump out of their seats. Another cool aspect of the film is that the survivors do not care what the monsters are. When the shit hits the fan, they just want to survive long enough to get away from the vampires.
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| Josh Hartnett and friends hide from vampires in "30 Days of Night". |
While the movie looks good and the vampires can be scary, this does not mean that the film itself is necessarily good. The biggest problem I had with the film, and the problem that pretty much killed it for me, was summed up by a friend who was there to watch it with me. Her response was, logically, “What’s the point?” After hearing that, I realized that this was the problem for me as well.
The audience does not know where the vampires came from. Earlier, I said that the main characters do not care about where the monsters came from and that was cool. However, would it have been so hard to add just a little extra time with the vampires for them to establish just a little bit of their background? It’s not the biggest problem with the movie but the question about the vampires’ origin bugged me throughout the film and was distracting.
The real problem that this film suffers from is that almost all of the scenes lead to nowhere. For example, there is a scene where a little girl has become one of the creatures and has to be killed. While it is disturbing, there was absolutely no point to it. None of the characters were related to the girl nor does the audience even know where the girl came from. There was no character development for anybody and it just played as a cheap horror scene included only for a quick scare.
Another huge problem with the film was the ending. While I will not give it away, there was a huge chance for some real good action. Instead, it just turns into another cheesy scene that looks like it was shot by a first time filmmaker who has zero imagination.
While director David Slade got the mood and atmosphere right, the useless scenes and the ultimately pointless story make this film a sad disappointment.
