If I've learned anything from writing in the public sphere it's that people don't look at your work the same way you do. Your masterpiece may never be regarded as such by anyone but yourself to the day you die. And if I've learned anything from writing reviews it's that people only seem to have fun when I'm busy ripping a film a new orifice. So in this vein here is another secretion from my literary bile duct concerning a direct to DVD (for reasons that will become abundantly apparent in this review) sequel to what I felt to be a reasonably good movie.
To start 30 Days of Night was originally a comic book written by Steve Niles and it was really good and gathered a pretty loyal following from what I understand. Enough so that it found itself being adapted into a full blown movie under the direction of David Slade, who really hadn't done much film directing at the time and honestly had spent much more time doing music video productions (admittedly for some very recognizable groups like P.O.D., Stone Temple Pilots, and R.E.M.). However, the combination of Steve Niles writing, David Slade directing and a pretty decent B+ cast, the movie became a relative success.
What I liked most about 30 Days of Night was that it acted as a much needed antidote to emo within the vampire genre that came to be popular in books and TV shows prior to 2007 and that seemed to explode in 2008 with shows like True Blood, Vampire Diaries and the Twilight movies. The vampires in 30 days are not misunderstood or romantic in any way, they are outright scary, feral, and visually unappealing. As a film, 30 Days of Night had excellent pacing for being set over the course of 30 days in Alaska during the monthly season where there is absolutely no daylight, hence the name. Most of the characters come across as being real humans with actual motivations and feelings of their own and managed to make me care whether they lived or died. As I understand it, the film was not completely faithful to the source material due to time and funding constraints, but I feel that as a film, it stands perfectly well on its own merits.
What I hated most about 30 Days of Night: Dark Days was that for starters the whole affair is one confused and poorly directed effort to cash in on a moderately successful film that only did well because all the right elements came together on a shoe string budget the way it rarely does, but when it does the results are beautiful and you get films of lasting quality like Gattaca or [Leon] The Professional (or maybe even The Fifth Element, but I think they had a pretty good budget going in). There are so many things I hated about this movie its hard to know where to begin. However, since I am of a literary bent, I will start with the writing.
I don't know what happened to Steve Niles that made him pass off on this project as a partner in the creative process but the result was a disaster. The motivations of all the characters are totally one dimensional; no one is even remotely fleshed out, the back stories are crap at best and the dialogue is dodgy even at its best. If I were to describe the major motivation of every single protagonist in this film it would read EXACTLY like this: vampires took someone close to me, so now I wants revenge! Also, the screenplay was written like all the characters are terminally stricken with severe retardation or at the very least a strong lack of practical sense.
This is admittedly one of my big hangups with horror movies in general: the protagonists always do stuff that I would never dream of doing and if anyone ever suggested the idea to me I would strike them in the face for even suggesting such a thing. Here are my pet peeves: splitting up, investigating strange noises, failing to level superior firepower when definitely available, "going it alone" for the sake of the group, or the ever classic cracking up at a moment of low tension and running off just so you can draw attention or run off and get skewered. It's like the writers make characters that intentionally do the dumbest things possible to make me as frustrated as I can possibly be as a viewer. I found myself silently screaming at all the characters in this movie for every obvious bad decision they made and every massive tactical fumble they made, seemingly right on cue to try and ratchet up the tension unnecessarily.
To clarify: people up against an unknown and obviously superior enemy = scary. People who make stupid decisions in the face of a dangerous but not invulnerable foe does not bloody equal scary, it just pisses me off and makes me want to abandon horror as a genre entirely because it makes me think there is nothing that can redeem such blatant stupidity.
Ok, enough about the writing. The acting is pretty bland so there isn't much to be said about that aside from the fact that it makes an already bad production worse. Not only do these people have nothing interesting to say, but they say it in the most boring way possible. I suppose that actors take what they can get, but this is simply repugnant.
The directing is crap. Scene transitions don't seem to make much sense and there's no feeling of the natural passage of time. Stuff just happens one thing after another and they don't seem to be related at all. Ben Ketai needs to go back to film school and that's all I have to say about that.
Alright, so I need to wrap all this up: 30 Days of Night: Dark Days says it makes twilight look like nursery school in its tagline. Well, that's true, but it makes it look like the nursery school where all the well fed and good mannered children went while it spent its detestable youth in some European hostel run by the certifiably insane.
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