30 Days of Night

Faithful translation + convincing acting + claustrophobic isolation = decent vamp movie

Once again, I read the source material before I saw the film adaptation. They did a good job; bonus points for stretching one graphic novel into a 113-minute movie without straining story or the pacing too much. (I felt it was a bit slow, but I also knew about the twisty-ending, so I am not a fair judge. My sweetie said it moved along just fine, however.) I was curious going into the movie whether the writers would stray too much, as they tend to do when their inspiration is inked, not typed. Nope, they did a good job there, and the actors did a great job of really making their desperation relate-able. It's got to be pretty hard to be thrown into day-for-night for 70 days of filming. I would be jetting off to a Caribbean island where the only thing that I would have to be leery of is the local water and making a fool of myself after too many mini-umbrella-ed drinks!

When I first heard that the movie was being compared to 28 Days Later for the carnage-factor, I was curious. I mean, I know the movie was going to be about a town being slaughtered, but to me, the story is more about the cat-and-mouse game to be played out between the vamps and the survivors. They did a good job of spinning that out, but man, were those vamps wasteful with their initial glut! I would have thought that they would have kept a few more like cattle, to save for later. To me, the ripping rather than biting seemed like a waste; no wonder these vamps were hungry--they play with their food too much. What use is red snow?
What really impressed me was the birdseye view of the carnage; that was neat in its execution.

The leading actors, Josh Hartnett and Melissa George, did a really credible job as two butt-kickers who have fallen out, but once teamed up, are greater than the sum of their parts (or issues). I think they spent a tad too long on their strained relationship (seriously, after being locked in an attic together for more than an hour, I would have to talk things out! What else is there to do?). I am glad that the writers didn't make up any "issues" for them; this was not a relationship drama, it was a survival drama.
The human characters met or exceeded my expectations, although I was a little underwhelmed by the vamps. In the graphic novels, I took their demarcated speech to mean that it was sibilant, not some Slavic-tinged language. C'mon, it's got to be hard to talk around those teeth, so they still would have needed the subtitles. I guess it was easier to make the actors unintelligible in a systematic way than to have them speak English.
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