At Home with John and Debbie

This is not a review of the film 30 Days of Night, because I’m too lazy to do that. Alright then, quickly: rather scary monsters, well done gore, ultimately doesn’t hold interest long enough.

Review ends.

No, what I really wanted to do was release some pedantry about the setting. It’s explicitly set in Barrow, Alaska, during its month-long period of darkness. That’s good for vampires, see.

Now, we’ve been there, albeit in summer, and can extrapolate what it’s like in winter. It clearly wasn’t filmed there (which is fine: all sorts of places stand in for London or New York in films). Architecturally it’s pretty close to the real Barrow (lots of corrugated metal; houses on stilts to avoid melting the permafrost and sinking into a puddle). Early on there’s a pretty view with a snowy hill in the foreground. I recall Barrow and its surroundings being perfectly flat.

In the film, we witness supposedly the last day of sunlight. It’s bright and sunny, then the sun sets. A basic knowledge of astronomy tells us that on the last day of sunlight (and the first), the sun pops its head over the horizon for a couple of minutes, then sets again.

Key to the film’s mise-en-scene, for the period of darkness, there are no flights in and out of Barrow. That’s not the case in real life - Alaska Airlines flies there at least twice a day, year round. But more importantly, it’s not even plausible. Why on earth would a bit of darkness stop an airport in its tracks?

Most people you see in Barrow are Inupiat Eskimos — and they don’t leave for winter. In the film there was barely an eskimo to be seen.

Barrow has a big AC Value supermarket. Every undead invasion film deserves its “raid the shop for survival” scene. The AC Value shop stocks guns and ammo. It stocks crossbows. Yet in the film, they raid a tiny grocery store.

Barrow lives on whaling. In the film, one character sports a “keep on whaling” t-shirt. So why was no vampire dispatched with a whaling harpoon? Poor show.

In the film, Barrow is portrayed as having a tiny population, of around 500, or 150 in winter. In reality it’s more like 4,000. Yet, even in the bigger real Barrow, you can walk to the airport from pretty much any part of town. In the film’s tiny Barrow, if you can’t drive to the airport before sunset, you’re stranded.

Irritating.

I can’t decide whether the lead vampire looks most like Neil Tennant, Huw Edwards or the singer from Danny Wilson.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 29th, 2008 at 10:13 and is filed under Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.