I’ve never read the comic from which 30 Days of Night is adapted, but I could still tell pretty quickly that the movie is a strong adaptation. Especially during the first half, so much of it feels like a comic.
Not in the same sense that Darkman feels like a comic book, but in the way that “mature” comics from Dark Horse or Vertigo tell their stories. (The comic was published by IDW, but Dark Horse Entertainment was one of the production companies for the movie, and it’s more about vibe than any specific franchises).
The movie’s full of stationary shots with strong compositions chosen for maximum impact. You can immediately imagine them being panels on a comic book page. Characters are often shot in close-up, delivering short lines of dialogue crammed full of as much weight as possible, and you can practically see the area on the frame where the speech bubble would appear.
And scenes of movement and action are shown in discrete static images — a victim, a close-up of a knife, a shot of blood landing on the ground. (Content warning: dogs are killed, but the action is suggested instead of shown, and we see the aftermath in extreme close-up. Children are killed as well, but off screen).
The story is set in the northernmost town in Alaska, where every winter there’s a 30-day period with no sunlight. We start on the last day of sun, when most of the town’s residents are leaving to catch a plane to Anchorage or elsewhere, not willing to spend a month in the dark. But a stranger (called only “The Stranger”) has also come into town, to cause a lot of trouble, guarantee the town is completely cut off from the rest of the world, and be a harbinger of their impending doom.
It’s really effective at setting the mood and setting the stakes. (So to speak). There is a real sense of building dread. And the movie doesn’t waste too much time having its monsters sneaking around in the dark; things get intense pretty quickly.
But that also means that the movie is more bleak and joyless than I’d expected, since I had heard that the movie is more of an action/horror hybrid than straight horror, and I’d expected the towns people to spend a lot more time fighting back. It quickly becomes a case of the humans being completely overwhelmed by an overpowered force, and they’re just having to figure out how to survive.
Danny Huston plays the chief vampire, and he spends the entire role speaking in some unrecognizable, presumably ancient language full of consonants and opportunities to spit. He’s putting a lot into it, but there’s not really enough of a hook to the character to be that interesting.
Josh Hartnett and Melissa George are playing the estranged married couple who are the leads, and they both do well, George in particular. She’s got more to work with, and she sells the idea of being the strongest-willed and smartest person in the room without overdoing it. Hartnett has to play The Hero, and he doesn’t really have any defining character traits beyond having asthma and sudden outbursts where he cares about family above everything else. Except for his grandmother, who he always calls by her first name and didn’t seem particularly attached to.
My other complaints are that it doesn’t feel like it builds to its conclusion, as much as it uses up all of its good ideas and then just has to settle on a finale that works as a horror action movie. The most clever thing the survivors do happens just after the halfway mark, and it’s not as satisfying as I’d been hoping from the premise. And there was a dramatic finale that I’d been expecting since it was foreshadowed early on, but it also gets used too early, and it doesn’t take out more than one vampire.
But none of my gripes about 30 Days of Night are all that damning; it’s a solid vampire movie with an interesting premise and a really strong first half. I just think it’s a lot stronger when it’s emulating horror comics than when it’s emulating other action movies from the early 2000s.
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