8 November 2007

An Incon-vein-ient Truth?


It's impossible to look at images of frozen landscapes these days without associating them with global warming, CO2 emissions, melting ice-caps and Co. How much more so when the depiction of those images are entwined with an urgency surrounding the sun?

Last night i went to see horror/vampire movie '30 Days of Night'. The plot is simple; the northern most town in Alaska is preparing for the period when the sun goes down and does not rise again for a month. Soon after the sun has gone down a hoard of vampires begin to feed on the townsfolk with unstobbable ease.

Right from the opening shot (of the place where the ice meets the sea) it seemed to me that this film was setting itself up to, in a unique way, discuss this climate crisis. My problem is that i can't work out wether or not i was making it up. Here's what i saw:

The use of vampires as the nemeses is at once natural and brilliant. The sunlight is their enemy; they suck the life blood from their victims; if you're biten but you don't die you become one of them, therefore we have the ability to be both victim and perpetrator in this allegory; Then, and most strikingly, is sense in which they are preying on this area and highlighting its vulnerability.

There was a point where the lead vampire says "It's taken centuries to make them not believe [in us], we can't let them suspect now."
This struck me as underlying the arguments climate change naysayers put forward. 'Our cars and planes don't make a difference, go back to sleep'.
Towards the end, in an attempt to cover up what's actually gone on, the vampires set fire to the town in the hope it will look like some horrible accident. Here we have the image of this town literally being consumed and melting, not only this, but it's achieved by letting oil run through the streets and lighting it.

Then there's the magnitude of the enemy; mighty, without conscience and invulnerable. Combined, obviously, with the horror of it all.

Finally, one of the central themes of the film is that of survival and 'what are you prepared to sacrifice in order to live?'.

If your stomach's up to it, go see this and let me know if i'm hearing the film correctly, or if it's just a better than average gore-fest.

2 comments:

Glen Marshall said...

Shouldn' that be "An incon-vein-ient Tooth"?

andy amoss said...

Good, v.good! The other one i was weighing up was 'A Transylvanient Truth'