30 Days of Night (2007)

Dir. David Slade

Starring: Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, Danny Huston, Ben Foster

A man stands on a snow-caked shore. Behind him a black freighter looms. He turns and sets off through the knee-deep drifts. Towards Barrow, the most northerly town in the United States.

As with Insomnia this film could have been set nowhere else in the US than Alaska, and nowhere better than Barrow, up on its northern coast. 30 Days of Night plays on exactly the same facet of Alaska’s northerly location as Insomnia but flips from summer to winter. If there is a land where the sun never sets for part of the year, conversely there must also be part of the year where the sun never rises. Barrow sees an entire month between dusk and dawn. As the films starts most of the inhabitants are heading for the last plane out of town before the dark falls. The population falls by two thirds. What they don’t know is that out of the 154 that are left 150 will not live to see the sun. Because vampires are coming.

It is an intriguing concept. The night is scary. In how many stories have the creatures, monsters, things attacked by night. Their victims are left terrified, straining their eyes into the dark, praying for the dawn. In most cases that dawn would only be a few hours away. In Barrow it would be days. Throw in vampires to that mix, vampires that are not the urbane Christopher Lee-esque charmers, not the conflicted Robert Pattison-alike heart-throbs, but vampires that are savage, bestial, barely human. The vampires of 30 Days of Night attack with a feral ferocity and talk in a screeching glottal language of their own. But they have cunning. Their agent, the stranger they send into town (Ben Foster), has his tasks to do before their arrival – destroy satellite phones, wreck the helicopter, slaughter the sled dogs. As darkness falls they move in to complete the isolation of the town, trashing the communications tower and knocking out the power grid. With no roads for ninety miles the remaining inhabitants are trapped in the dark with no way out.

To be honest they don’t really need to cut off the power. What harm could a few street lamps do to creatures that can shrug off a bullet? But it all helps to terrify the humans, to make them understand before they die that – in the words of the vampires’ leader Marlow – there is “No God” (the only English any of the creatures utter). Meanwhile the deranged stranger (Ben Foster), believing that the vampires will reward him for his loyalty, raves unnervingly from his prison cell. “You can feel it. That cold ain’t the weather. That’s death approaching.”

I already had my write-up composed in my head even before I watched the film. I thought I would be using words like ‘hokey’, ‘contrived’, ‘passable’. In actual fact I kinda liked it. The central idea is a good one and I love that the vampires are depicted as monsters and not just better-looking, better-dressed versions of ourselves that just happen to suck blood (they are well dressed though, in suit jackets and party dresses, as though they have just stepped off a cruise-liner). Their not-quite-right faces smeared with blood are genuinely pretty disturbing. They don’t mess around – they storm into town and they take it. There is a great overhead tracking shot showing them slaughtering the remaining townsfolk in the snowy streets. Plus it has great shout-outs to other classics recognisable to the genre-savvy viewer. The isolated frozen terrain brings to mind John Carpenter’s The Thing. Ben Foster plays a seriously creepy ‘Renfield’. There is a ghoulish little girl a la Night of the Living Dead. And if Bruce Campbell made the chainsaw iconic in the Evil Dead series of films by Sam Raimi (who produced this movie), well, you should see the size of the saw Beau (Mark Boone Junior) has on the front of his tractor! The visuals are crisp and stark, betraying elements of the story’s visual novel genesis. If you like your horror movies to be packed with action and gore, this is one for you!

Going out in this weather?
You'll catch your death!

However, for me, the film could have been scarier. The build up is really promising – isolated clues and events, the cryptic comments of the stranger. But then the tension dissipates. The vampires go for full-frontal assault, slaughtering the townsfolk seemingly within the first 24 hours. After that it is just the story of a bare dozen survivors trying to hatch a plan as days pass. I would have liked to see the tension stretched out further as the vampires pick off the human population one by one, their attacks staged over days rather than in one mad orgy of blood-letting, whittling away at the defences of a Barrow that realises that it is under siege but which doesn’t yet understand what by. That is what would work if you had maybe half-a-dozen vampires to play with. But here there are loads. Against a half-dozen you could maybe go all Yippe-kay-yay and defeat them. But faced with the numbers seen here, and their unnatural strength, the survivors could never hope to destroy them all. As Marlow comments, “When man meets a force he cannot destroy, he destroys himself”. All Sheriff Eben Oleson (Josh Hartnett) and his soon-to-be ex-wife Stella (Melissa George, only sounding Australian at a few points in the movie) can do is harbour the remaining survivors and try to survive until morning. This leads to pacing problems. The amount of action on offer would easily fill one normal-length night. But 30 days? What on earth are they doing in the week they spend hiding in the attic, or the week they spend hiding in the supermarket, or the week they spend hiding in the police station? And aren’t they cold? And why does no one need the toilet until day 17? It would have been nicer if the film was, actually, longer, so the tension could be ratcheted up and the survivors be given personalities other than ‘woman’, ‘big man with beard’, ‘slightly batty grandad’ etc.

What have I learnt about Alaska?

Frankly, it’ll be the death of you. There are people who are drawn to its isolation. “Isn’t that why we live out here?” Beau asks Eben, “You know, for a little freedom?” These are rugged, individuals, used to living at the furthermost frontier of America. But that life is relies upon at least the bare essentials of civilisation – communications, transport, electricity, other people. Take all of that away and they are mere survivors, waiting for the storm to pass.

Can we go there?

Barrow really exists, and really is the northernmost town in the USA. It is also one of the most northerly towns in the world, with only a few scattered settlements in Norway, Greenland and Russia ahead of it. It does indeed see an entire season when the sun is below the horizon – this lasts between November and January (65 days rather than thirty). Its population is also around ten times higher than that depicted in the movie. It is, however, unconnected to the rest of Alaska by road. If you want to come in you will have to fly or sail.

The movie was not filmed in Barrow, or even in Alaska. The company went south instead of north, and ended up in New Zealand. Shooting was done in studios in Auckland and outside in Otago in the South Island (the area made famous by the Lord of the Rings movies).


Overall Rating: 2/5

Insomnia (2002)

Dir. Christopher Nolan

Starring: Al Pacino, Robin Williams, Hilary Swank, Maura Tierney

An adaptation of a 1997 Norwegian film, Insomnia could have been set nowhere else in the United States than Alaska. Alaska provides more than just the scenery in the background – it affects the characters within it, forcing them to act in certain ways. No one feels this more strongly than Detective Will Dormer (Al Pacino). Sent up from Los Angeles to help investigate the death of 17-year old Kay Connell he is unprepared for the merciless Alaskan conditions. When he suggests rousting Kay’s boyfriend out of class it has to be pointed out to him that it is ten o’clock. In the evening.

The city of Nightmute is located at such a northerly latitude that it experiences ‘White Nights’ – days in which the sun does not actually set. This is the land of the midnight sun. Even at night the skies are still bright, the light creeping around the edges of the blinds in Dormer’s room, preventing him from sleeping. Lack of sleep plays with his perceptions and nerves. On the flight in he already looked tired. After six days he looks haggard as hell, dead on his feet. He gets jumpy. Pursuing an armed suspect in a ghostly Alaskan coastal mist he opens fire. But the man who falls is not the murderer, but Dormer’s partner Hap Eckhart (Martin Donovan).

The lack of sleep and the enshrouding fog would have provided mitigating circumstances for Eckhard’s death, except for one thing: he cannot guarantee that it was an accident. Eckhard, with his dying breaths, certainly thinks Dormer’s actions were deliberate. Both were under investigation by Internal Affairs back in L.A. and Eckhard was going to go on record, probably incriminating Dormer in the process. This could lead to Dormer’s reputation being tarnished and the overturning of all his cases, letting criminals back out onto the streets. Eckhard’s death could easily look non-accidental to someone aware of this. So Dormer panics, hides the evidence, claims that the suspect shot Eckhard.

Losing his way:
Detective Will Dormer takes a shot in the dark

One of the introductory shots in the movie is that of a drop of blood hitting a shirt cuff. As soon as it makes contact it spreads, twining its way among the fibres. As with blood, so also does a lie spread and stain. Dormer’s framing of a suspect back in L.A. leads to the Internal Affairs investigation. The investigation means that he is sent off to Alaska. Because he is in Alaska he accidentally kills his partner. Because of the investigation he has to cover up his own part in the death. But Kay’s murderer sees him. Now the murderer has something on Dormer. The murderer claims to be his ‘new partner’ – they have to work in collaboration. If he is arrested he will tell all he knows about Dormer. Instead they need to frame a ‘patsy’. Dormer is faced with the knowledge that an innocent boy could be found guilty of Kay’s murder. The lie spreads and spreads, trapping the increasingly erratic Dormer in its web. Is it the daylight that is stopping him from sleeping, or the worry over the investigation, and the guilt at his partner’s death? Hero-worshipping local cop Ellie (Hilary Swank) reminds him of his own words: “A good cop can’t sleep because he’s missing a piece of the puzzle. And a bad cop can’t sleep because his conscience won’t let him.”

Alaska is a grey land. There is no black and white, just shades of grey. Flying into the Nightmute the fractured ice is like a forest, the mist-shrouded woods like a sea. Day and night are indistinguishable. So too – at least in the eyes of novelist Walter Finch – are the good guys and the bad. Dormer killed someone accidentally. So too did he. He and Dormer are the same. Dormer carried out a bad action (planting evidence) to get a good result (convicting a paedophile). If he owns up to shooting Eckhard (a good action) there will probably be a bad result (the acquittal of the criminals he has previously convicted). To prevent that he has to do one final bad action – letting Finch get away with his crime. All is shrouded in thick Alaskan fog. By the end even Dormer cannot remember whether the shooting was an accident or not. His final act is to stop Ellie disposing of the evidence that would incriminate him, to stop her sliding down the same slope he himself has slipped. “Don’t lose your way.”

I feel I have to point out that the depiction of the midnight sun is exaggerated for effect. I once spent midsummer in the backwoods outside Tampere, Finland, a city at a more northerly latitude than Nightmute. There too the sun never set. But it did not present the blazing daylight that so unsettles Dormer at all hours. Instead, at around 11 in the evening a crepuscular dusk would fall as the sun hovered on the horizon. This twilight would last until 3 AM, and then the sun would commence its slide up into the sky again. But the film does leave us with the question of whether Dormer’s perceptions are accurate. Coming into his room at night hotel-owner Rachel (Maura Tierney) puts the light on – to her eyes the room is dark.

This is a great film, probably the one I’ve enjoyed most out of the five so far. It is reminiscent in some ways of the Hitchcock classic Vertigo. The story is a taut noir-ish tale where no one is innocent. Even Ellie’s presumed actions will destroy the reputation of a very good cop. The setting is integral to the plot. All the performances are superb, with Pacino thankfully dialling down the performance a notch and internalising his mental strain. Instead it is up to the production to suggest his altered mindset, with shifts in focus, strange angles, echoing sounds. And a big mention to Robin Williams as Walter Finch. He manages to portray the apparent normalcy and rationality of a deranged mind. Having also been a fan of his performance in One Hour Photo I have to say that I much prefer Williams creepy to zany.

What have I learned about Alaska?

Alaska is a merciless land. As in Into The Wild it has great beauty, but it does not tolerate weakness. For every roadside waterfall or tonguing glacier there is a fog-coated boulder-strewn shoreline or an icy river choked with logs. And of course there is the seasonal shift which ushers in the White Nights, when the sun shines 24 hours a day. The upsetting of normal rhythms is bound to play savagely with the mental state of any newcomer – Finch suffered from insomnia just as much as Dormer.

The people in Alaska are on the run from someone or something. This is a land which prizes individuality. Rachel puts it bluntly: “There are two kinds of people in Alaska: those who were born here and those who come here to escape something”. She has trouble in her past. So too do Finch and Dormer. They should fit right in.

Can we go there?

Nightmute? Sure. It sits on Alaska’s west coast on the Etolin Strait. It is a little place with around 200 inhabitants, over 90% of whom are Native American. You probably won’t recognise it from this movie however. The film itself was shot over ten degrees of latitude further south and forty degrees of longitude further east in Squamish, British Columbia, Canada. Squamish is much more densely populated and easier to access, being located half-way along the two-hour drive between metropolitan Vancouver and the winter sports resort of Whistler. Being located so much further south however Squamish doesn’t have those White Nights that keep Donner so on edge. In fact Squamish is at roughly the same latitude as the Channel Islands whereas Nightmute is at the same latitude as the Shetlands. The fictional Nightmute seems a lot larger than the real one however – presumably artistic licence just because the city has a suitable name (in Nightmute the nights are themselves muted, in that they do not go dark). Hey, don’t blame me for trying to conjecture symbolism in names. I’m not the one who called the lead character, plagued by insomnia, ‘Dormer’ – which to my ears sounds suspiciously like dormire – ‘to sleep’ in Latin.


Overall Rating: 5/5

Into The Wild (2007)



Dir. Sean Penn

Starring: Emile Hirsch, Marcia Gay Harden, William Hurt, Jena Malone

In Fried Green Tomatoes Ninny comments to the secret to life is friends. The protagonist of Into The Wild, Christopher McCandless (or ‘Alexander Supertramp’ as he calls himself), rejects that notion. He is searching for solitude, for isolation, to escape from ‘society’. Following graduation he empties his bank account and sends the contents to Oxfam, packs what little he feels he needs, and hits the road. His travels take him across Arizona to the coast of California, up to South Dakota, down the Colorado River to Mexico, and then back up through California, the Yukon and into Alaska. Alaska, the dream of ‘the wild’, called him and led him out into the great outdoors to live off the land, relying only on himself. And this results in his death. The irony is that he made friends along the way who helped him to this destiny – hippies Jan and Rainey (Catherine Keener and Brian Dierker), farmer Wayne (Vince Vaughan) and widower Ron (Hal Holbrook). At last, weak and starving, he reaches his final conclusion: happiness is only real when shared.

Escaping from the grind of daily life is a dream, finding solitude and tranquillity out in the wilderness an ideal. There is a reason why we have phrases such as ‘quitting the rat-race’ and ‘escape to the country’. But it is a hard road to take. There is truth in Chris’s warning that “money makes you cautious”. What would you do with your life if you didn’t have to justify the next pay-cheque? Turning ones back on civilisation, on society, on friends and family is the ultimate expression of this philosophy. It is not something I think I could do. But he believes in the dream of living at one with nature rather than living in a net of pettifogging human-created rules and regulations (whether learners are allowed to drive in different states or a twelve-year waiting list to get a permit to raft down a river).

Emile Hirsch deserves plaudits for his performance as Christopher. By turns outgoing and introspective, vigorous and skeletal, he breathes life into a character that can only be understood through his writings and his reading. From devouring Jack London and Henry Thoreau he comes to reject society and idealise living at one with nature. He owes everything to his books. Not just his philosophy which comes to be like a mania for him, but also his survival skills. After shooting a moose he sprints back to fetch his notes of what he should do next. He relies on his nature guide to tell him what wild plants he can and cannot eat. His failure to turn over a page leads to him to confuse two species, one edible and one poisonous. His books led him out into the wilds of Alaska, and his books gave him false confidence that he could survive.

Christopher is fleeing the ‘lie’ of his childhood and his parents. He rejects his family, not even letting them know that he is alive. Yet the people that he meets are all searching for their own family. He reminds Jan of her own son. Ron offers to adopt him. Tracey (Kristen Stewart) falls in love with him. And left behind at home is Carine, his sister (Jena Malone). They had supported each other against their emotionally distant parents (Marcia Gay Harden and William Hurt). His escape is a betrayal of her. Her voiceover seeks to explain why he did this to her. Searching desperately for a reason she can believe in she rationalises his behaviour; her excuses for him sound like nothing so much as those of a cult-member. Everyone is searching for someone. The only person Chris is searching for is himself.

Looking for something:
Emile Hirsch as Christopher McCandless

This true story obviously meant a lot to Sean Penn, who not only directed the film, but also adapted Jon Krakauer’s original book for the screen. Throughout the bare, hypnotic Eddie Vedder-composed soundtrack complements the lush cinematography perfectly. It conjures up a back-woods hobo-y feel but never intrudes. Amazingly – considering that they do not come out of it well -  the McCandless family gave their blessing to the production.

What have I learned about Alaska?

Alaska is a land of wonder and beauty. But then so is everywhere Christopher travels. These elements can be found in storms over the Arizonan desert, the forests of the Californian coast, or the gorges and canyons of the Colorado. But here nature is much more fickle. A river can change from fordable to a raging torrent, plant species look alike, no sooner has a moose been killed then its meat is rendered inedible by flies. Most importantly, if you want to venture out into the Alaskan backwoods prepare properly, know your route, and make sure you can get out again in an emergency.

Can we go there?

There’s a lot of ‘there’ to go, with the film being shot on location in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, California, Oregon, Washington, South Dakota and Mexico as well as Alaska. But it is the Alaskan scenery that will stick longest in the memory. These were shot in Denali National Park near the town of Cantwell. More interestingly, the actual ‘magic bus’ where McCandless lived and died is located around fifty miles further north along the ‘Stampede Trail’, around 25 miles west of Healy. And the bus is still there. It can be hiked to – as long as the Teklinika River is not in flood.


Overall Rating: 4/5



Christpher McCandless himself at the 'Magic Bus'

Week 2: Alaska

"Alaska, Alaska,
 I'll stay right here in Alaska,
 All settled down and having fun
 Here in the land of the midnight sun..."
 - 'Alaska',
     Phish

From the creeks and crickets of Alabama we head north, waaay north, to check out Alaska. 'Tis a wild land, a savage land - if it ain't a mountain it's a glacier, an' if it ain't a glacier then it's probably a bear. But there's riches aplenty that bring hardy folk up here, folk with lumberjack shirts and bristling beards (and that's just the women!). There's gold. There's solitude. And there's halibut.

Alaska is a paradox. It's the largest state, but with the smallest population. And I think that'll show itself in the three films I've picked: 

• Into The Wild (2007)
• Insomnia (2002)
• 30 Days of Night (2007)

Sadly, one of my original choices wasn't on Lovefilm: a movie called, simply, Alaska. But it had a young Vincent Kartheiser (Pete Campbell from Mad Men) searching the wilderness for his lost pilot father (Dirk Benedict, Face from The A-Team)! How cool does that sound? Hope people enjoy Insomnia instead...