Beowulf and 30 Days of Night

I'd really been looking forward to both of these, and can't give either one better than a mixed review.

"Beowulf" is a lot of fun to look at, and makes good use of the flexibility the computer-generated sets give the director. There are shots in this movie that would be entirely impossible to pull off in a live action film. On the other hand, the story itself isn't very interesting, even taking liberties with the source material. For all the gore and violence, it ultimately feels empty. The featurette showing how it was done was better than the movie itself, and you can see how this technology is likely to result in much more entertaining films down the road. I wouldn't recommend this movie unless you're interested in seeing how it was made. I'd give it a four out of ten, and consider it a passable rental flick. Add another two to the rating if you have a real interest in the technical aspect, and add one if you need some help in picturing what Angelina Jolie looks like naked.

"30 Days of Night" has some very flavorful vampires speaking some weird, Eastern European-sounding language. The creative people behind this film said they were trying to make vampires scary again. That they did; there are some nicely scary shots here, emphasizing vampire as predator, not seducer. However, they utterly failed to make the vampires (or anyone else) logical. Why would vampires make a particular effort to get to a place where there are 30 days of night only to seemingly eat most of the population on the first night, then hang around forever trying to find the last few survivors? They could've done that anywhere! And I can't imagine predators wasting as much food as they did here. I realize that a horror movie is about scares more than necessarily figuring out a sensible ecology of the vampiric species, but when the logic is this weak, my suspension of disbelief is damaged to the point where the scares don't work for me. I no longer care enough to be scared.

The first twenty or thirty minutes of the movie contain some of the most obvious set-ups for later elements that I've ever seen. I understand that if you want to use something later, you have to establish its presence earlier in the film, but it was as if they didn't even try to make those things appear to arise naturally. The main characters suffer from the usual horror movie cliche of doing really stupid things, because if they don't, there's no story. This happens over and over. I really wish that people who made horror films would show a little more respect for the genre by having characters actually make sensible choices and the scary stuff happens anyway! There's a lot to like in the look and behavior of the vampires (and just a hint of the underlying vampire culture), but there were just too many gaping holes in the internal logic for me to really enjoy myself. I'll give it four of out ten because I liked the look and feel of the vampires, but I didn't like anything else about this one.