by Donald Lind

Created on: October 22, 2007

"30 Days of Familiarity"

Director David Slade's "30 Days of Night" promises a fresh take on the legend of vampires. It promises a vampire story "like you've never seen before." Unfortunately for Slade and crew, "30 Days of Night" doesn't show much in the way of originality; in fact, it feels awfully similar despite its claims.

To be fair to the film, any vampire movie lost its originality the second Bram Stoker published "Dracula." That book, along with its 1931 film adaptation and crucial German predecessor, 1922's "Nosferatu" set the stage for all movies about creatures of the night. Literally every film that followed had to either adhere to the parameters in which the creatures existed or spend precious screen time debunking those "movie myths." In fact at one point in this film, a character rejects an ultraviolet light as a weapon because "just because it worked on Bela Lugosi" doesn't mean it'll work on them."

The story for "30 Days of Night" unfolds simply and quickly. Up above the Arctic Circle in a town called Barrow, Ala., the northern-most city in America, people are packing up and catching the last flight out of the road-less, snowbound town in preparation for the coming month of constant darkness and frequent blizzards. After departure, the population is literally 152. Soon after dusk, a pack of vicious bloodsuckers descend on the village and begin systematically tearing the townspeople apart. A small group of survivors, led by Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) and his ex-wife Stella (Melissa George) must wait out the endless night and hope to survive the onslaught.

That's pretty much the entire plot of the movie. What follows is a brief montage of the monsters laying siege to the town, then a long period of survivors hiding and whispering out plans. Soon after this, the plan backfires and a chase scene ensues. Aside from the previously-mentioned massacre, these sequences repeat several times over the course of two hours.

A simplistic plot of cat-and-mouse would work here except that the film is missing several key ingredients: first, it fails to develop any of the characters to care whether or not they live or die, and in some cases, it fails to give certain faces even a basic personality so people watching can check off their list when that person, ahem, bites the big one. The other principle failure is that the film's main attraction-the vampires themselves-aren't all that interesting.

Both the film, and the graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Tempersmith,

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