30 Days of Night

0 Stars



There are some movies that should never have been made. An imdb.com search of the 100 lowest-rated films reveals a smorgasbord of such unmediated disasters: “The Tony Blair Witch Project,” “From Justin to Kelly,” “Phat Girlz” and “Gigli” to name a few. I am confident that when “30 Days of Night” has been released long enough for a handful of helpless viewers to suffer though it, the movie will edge out “Who’s Your Caddy?” for the honor of the lowest-rated movie in recent history. Or maybe ever.

The movie, which chronicles a vampire attack during the dead of winter when the far-North town of Barrow, Alaska, experiences no sunlight for a month, is perhaps the least innovative movie ever made.

It profits from a host of preexisting stereotypes. Vampires wield long, razor-sharp fangs and even longer, yellowing nails. They attack humans at the throat and suck their blood until they die, and as a result they are always sporting beards of dried blood on their mouths and chins. They howl at the moon in unison and speak an absurd imaginary language comprised primarily of guttural shrieks and raspy hiccups. And, naturally, they can’t stand the sunlight.

Josh Hartnett, the only big name in a cast of unknowns, plays the town sheriff who must try to save the motley crew of townspeople who survive the initial attacks. The movie is a real low for Hartnett.

It isn’t a general prejudice against vampire movies that prompts such an emphatically negative reaction on my part. Didn’t “28 Days Later” prove that blood-sucking could still make for a good movie? But what “28 Days Later” boasts that “30 Days of Night” doesn’t (besides sunshine and two fewer days) is a plotline, a motive, and anything, really, beyond just blood-sucking. The film lacks a back-story, an explanation of where the vampires came from, or what they want. It’s just 113 minutes of biting people.

Even the characters have no personal histories. It’s as though they’ve been steamrolled by director David Slade and have come out flatter than the cartoons from the original comic book story on which the movie is ever-so-loosely based. But there’s no point in wasting screen time developing characters’ personalities or backgrounds—they’re all going to die before you can get attached to them anyway.

All except Hartnett, always the provincial braveheart. The screenwriters make a few pitiful attempts to provide Harnett with opportunities for grade-A Hollywood heroism: When the vampires use a young girl as bait to lure the survivors into the street, Hartnett rushes in with his axe at the ready and tries (unsuccessfully) to save the girl. Later, when the survivors sneak from one hiding place from another, Hartnett fends off the bloodthirsty villains with a UV lamp his grandmother used to grow weed (for medical purposes, of course).

Yet somehow, Hartnett can’t deliver. And this, really, is the tragedy of the film: Hartnett, the heartthrob of our high-school years (remember him in “Pearl Harbor”? So handsome. Remember him in “40 Days and 40 Nights”? So cute.) has become just another second-rate nobody in a vampire movie. And since Hartnett spends the entire film with his head covered and his body hidden under layers of fur and down coats, we are denied that simple aesthetic pleasure that can be counted on to redeem even a mediocre Hartnett film.

Ultimately Hartnett injects himself with vampire blood so that he can fight vampire with vampire. This monumental sacrifice means he flakes away into a million pieces when the sun rises on the handful of survivors in Barrow, but it’s probably for the best; we don’t really want to remember he made this movie anyway.

—Staff writer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.