30 Days of Night

If you want to spend two hours watching people make the worst possible choices at every single opportunity, you can turn on CSPAN whenever they’re covering Congressional speeches and watch it for free. Or, you can pay your hard earned money and go watch 30 Days of Night.

I decided to watch this movie because my review of it had not yet been written to disabuse me of the notion that it could be a good movie. After all, the plot summary had some potential. It takes place in Barrow, Alaska (bonus points for me since I was born in AK, and since I have an aunt who lived in Barrow), it takes place during the winter when the sun doesn’t rise (hence the 30 days of night), and it had vampires in it.

I’m tempted to put a “Plot spoiler” alert here, but it would be too generous to call the random events that occur during 30 Days of Night “plot.” Thus, I shall issue my:

Those who think I’m exaggerating the pointlessness of what happens in this story really ought to trust me here; but go watch it if you doubt. Ye shall come forth heaping praise upon me for mine warning.

Anyway, the story opens up with everyone’s cell phones being stolen and burned. Despite the fact that not everyone’s cell phone is stolen and burned. In fact, everyone who needs a cell phone still has a cell phone. Also in fact, the disappearing cell phones have absolutely no purpose in the story. Oh yeah, also also in fact, later on the vampires are going to destroy the cell tower anyway rendering the stolen cell phones completely superflous, unnecessary, and otherwise Congressional.

Then the movie suddenly flashes to a scene of a bunch of huskies. They’re barking and growling and there’s spooky music as they get slaughtered.

Then we’re back to normal and you’re never quite sure why all the dogs were killed. Supposedly it’s so later on no one can mush out of town for freedom. I’m thinking the movie producers don’t know where Barrow is.

Speaking of that…why aren’t there any Eskimos living in Barrow?

Oh well. The movie begins the human slaughter by having the guy in the cell tower hear a sudden noise outside. Naturally, this makes the idiot wander out about 500 yards from the entrance to the cell tower, armed with a flashlight, as he investigates. Because, ya know, people who live in a town that has to deal with polar bears always wander out in the cold armed with a flashlight whenever they hear a “mysterious” noise that sounds like someone banging a pot with a spoon.

Again oh well. As the random events progress, people mysteriously die, getting slaughtered left and right. You can’t keep track of any characters, but it’s not like it matters because you’re sitting there thinking, “These people are too dumb to have me concern myself about them.”

Case in point: two guys are hooking up with a girl and they decide to do “Paper-Rock-Scissors” to decide which of the two guy’s houses they’ll go back to. Lo and behold, they get through “Paper-Rock” and BAM! one of the guys disappears. So the surviving girl and the guy stand there like complete idiots calling out the missing guy’s name.

Don’t worry, a few seconds later his body comes falling out of the sky. The girl takes off running while the guy continues to stand there. You know, like what you’d do if you just saw someone get whisked away into thin air and then deposited next to you from a great height.

Later on, the movie manages to top this. One of the characters decides he’s going to walk to Wainwright. His son decides, after having seen lots of people being killed left and right by vampires, that the smart thing to do would be to run down the middle of the street yelling, “DAD!” as loud as he can.

Amazingly enough, he got killed by the vampires. Who woulda seen THAT one coming?

Frankly, by the end of the movie you realize that no character in the script has the sense God gave a bag of pork rinds. In fact, you could replace half the cast with those bags of pork rinds and the collective IQ of the characters would have doubled.

Now I’m not going to ruin the ending for you because it’s bad enough I don’t need to do so. But the net result of this movie is a whopping F. And that’s being generous.

Bottom line: I’m a writer. If I had written this script, I’d look at taking up figure skating.