Still As Life

Having just spent 2 hours at the cinema watching 30 Days of Night, I feel that I would like my $7 back.

I am glad I get a student discount cause I would be really annoyed if I had spent the full $14.50 on a ticket only to find out how much of a let down it was.

30 Days of Night is a movie about an Alaskan town (don't ask me which exactly as it was not something that was emphasised in the movie) that has a month of darkness.

During this month though, something unusual happens and vampires visit the town and kill almost everyone bar a few survivors. In the end, our hero, Eban, the sheriff, turns himself into a vampire in order to be able to fight the vampires, and then dies in the sunlight as the sun comes back on the morning of the 31st day.

The story itself was not that bad, but what could have been quite a good plot was ruined by an overly beastial portrayal of the vampires, despite their being able to speak a language that seemed quite cool.

I think they would have been better portrayed with a degree of class such as in Underworld, or even Blade.

I had quite a few quibbles with 30 Days of Night in regards to some of the story points.

The first was that when Stella was in an accident just before the darkness came, she commented that her car was totaled, but apart from the tractor being half on top of it, it looked completely undamaged, no visible damage around the tractor or anything.

The second was later, when they were hiding in the attic of one of the houses, they had a lamp on, and they were watching the outside through a torn flap in the roof. Now maybe it's just me, but if it's dark, and there is any gap at all in the attic roof, the light will show through to the outside, and if there is a gap as big as the flap they were looking out, it would be quite visible. Yet the vampires never found them in the attic, despite the fact that they were wandering the roof tops, so many of them would have been eye level with the emitted light.

The third was, it took over a week for there to be a blizzard so they could use it as cover to move outside, and it only lasted for a duration of about 2 minutes in the movie, I would estimate in what they achieved in those 2 minutes that it may have been more like 5-10 minutes if it were real. I'm no expert on it, but surely in that area there would be blizzards, or at least heavy winter storms a bit more frequently than that, and for longer. I know that when we have summer storm weather, we get one almost every day for a week or 2. Not the same I know, but I expect it would be similar. They did mention that it was a whiteout once or twice, which would make sense to be less frequent, but I still don't think it really worked that great in that regard.

There was one or two other things that really annoyed me about it, but it would seem I have since forgotten due to paying less and less attention to it.

No doubt there are people who thought a lot more of it than I did, after all, IMDB's user rating's put it at 7.1/10 at the time of writing this, but I thought it could definitely be better.

Labels: movies, rants