I was expecting very little when I slid the DVD in, but it only took a few magnificently haunting shots of huge dark clouds over flowing snowfields to know that I would like this movie in spite of nearly flaw. The cinematography is crisp and beautiful and it's the engine that builds the first portion of this film, a nice slow, creepy, deliberate foundation for the flawed but frightening second and third acts.
It's one of the most horrifically violent films I've ever seen when it finally gets rolling, but it's pacing out the outset ramps up to this quite effectively. It never becomes a gore film, because we care enough about the characters to find the violence shocking and threatening, not exploitative. The gore is only half seen, and you’re left wondering if you actually saw what you think you saw; we're never invited to share in the quality of the make up, or given a moment to appreciate how realistic the severed head is.
The film is very stylish without being over-stylized, and makes interesting choices, if not always correct ones. There is a major scene in the comic that's played for humor, and the film rightfully changes it to fit the tone; it's the exact same event, but framed in nearly the opposite way. At one point, there's an enormous explosion, and it occurs in near silence. It's an effective subversion of expectations.
I'm not a big fan of vampires generally, the gothy romance attached to them leaves me bored. The Alaskan vampires here, led by an eerie Danny Huston, were everything the vampires in I Am Legend should have been: fast, feral, inhuman, but still played by actors. They’re consistently unnerving and scary, the way the communicate like a pack of birds, and move like wolves. They're human only in shape, and just barely.
Overall, the acting is very mediocre, but some very interesting choices are made. Josh Hartnett's protagonist is anything but tough guy. He needs his inhaler, and his voice cracks with fear; it goes along way to allowing us to connect to him more as a regular guy.
The whole thing moves in fits and starts when the shit hit's the fan, and we lose a week of time here and there, which serves to let the tension evaporate when it could be building constantly. Some odd and not very effective choices are made with a little girl vampire which put to mind some major lost opportunities. And the ending is throughly anticlimactic and sacrifices a lot of the consistency the movie had built upon.
Overall it's a success: the overwhelming bleakness of it all feels more like an apocalypse or zombie movie, where our heroes are survivors and outnumbered. Which is a good thing.
Much better than the comic.
Arbitrarily I give it 4 out of 5 possible Alaskas:
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