Hello, and welcome to the first entry in my one-part series, Let’s Start to Redeem a Movie but Then Actually Watch That Movie and Be Like, No, Wait, My Mistake, the Critics Were Right the First Time.

30 Days of Night

“There’s a good movie in here,” can be said about a lot of movies, but not all of them. Attack of the Clones isn’t one edit away from being coherent, and you can chop up Mad Foxes as much as you want, but you’re still getting a story about the world’s least likeable boyfriend and his best friend, a bathtub full of piss (please do not watch Mad Foxes).

But 30 Days of Night really is a couple of tweaks and rewrites away from, if not greatness, then at least having the confidence to make fuck-me eyes at greatness from the other end of the bar. It’s actually annoying how close the film comes to achieving something fascinating, only to falter again and again, and often for the same reason.

First, let’s appreciate what works:

• Assault on Precinct 13, Also Vampires is a great premise for a film. Aside from just being awesome, “What if a Grim Situation Was Steeped in Something Fundamentally Unknowable?” opens up endless narrative and tonal pathways to explore. Just ask Sinners!
• There are moments of strikingly efficient visual storytelling – that opening shot of the Stranger’s face, the subsequent shot of the tanker in the distance, the overhead tracking shot during the first night of feasting – all present a harrowing, cruel world in which the vampires are more like a disease than a traditional enemy that can be repelled by traditional methods.
• The fact that Eben kind of sucks actually works to the movie’s advantage. We can’t just rely on an Extremely Virile Protagonist (Heaving Abdominals Division) to save the day. Having our hero’s focus be survival shifts the scope and tone of the film from Shooty-Shooty Blam-Blam to something darker, sadder, and more personal. High Noon, baby!

But while the premise has oodles of good shit going on, they fumble the goddamn ball in the execution:

• All that tonal build-up deflates at the exact moment the film should be cashing in its ominous chips – our haunting, stark opening gives way to shaky-cam whenever the vampires attack, and the whole notion of a siege is undone as characters just go outside whenever they feel like it.
• The idea of the town being a character unto itself is wasted. Giving our lovably murderous hillbillies the sole advantage of knowing how to survive could have turned this movie into an awesome, grim game of cat-and-mouse, with the roles of hunter and hunted constantly flipping. Instead we get a different game, one called Oh No, The Second Act Just Started And We’re Already Out of Ideas – Quick, Have Them Argue About Things in an Attic.
• There are Movie Things in places in which Movie Things are not needed. Eben and Stella being an estranged married couple adds nothing to the movie except for a few throwaway lines, and is clearly only in the film because Estranged Couple Reconnects During Events of Film is a thing that happens in movies.
• The mostly random insertion of Movie Things also leads to a baffling climax, in which our hero chugs some action juice and just… dukes it out with the head vampire, which makes no sense given the tone and scope of the film.
• Nobody seems to be on the same page, performance-wise. Josh Hartnett goes small, Ben Foster goes big, Mark Boone Junior is in an action movie, Melissa George is making a series of mental notes to fire her agent – not great! Even the vampires play it differently –  some are haunting, some are primal. I don’t know if it was the direction, or what, but everybody seems to be in a slightly different movie.

There is a trend, here! The things that work are all working in concert to facilitate the narrative, whereas the things that don’t work are just generic Movie Things that seem to have been placed in the film to paper over moments where the filmmakers weren’t sure what else to do. A smaller, focused movie will always be better than a larger one under any circumstance, but especially when the larger one has only achieved that size by pumping itself full of stuff that doesn’t really have anything to do with anything.

The End

Just because something works in a movie doesn’t mean it’ll work in your movie. Any given entry in the list of Things That Sometimes Happen in a Movie doesn’t automatically pair with every other entry just because they both happen to be on the same list. Do you get every single thing at the buffet? I fucking hope not! Do that, and one day you’ll head back to your table with crab legs and gelato on the same plate. People would rather sit next to Genghis Khan than some guy who has crab legs and gelato on the same plate.

Don’t be the crab legs and gelato guy.