Why is it that we find it easier to abrogate responsibility for our decisions to other people than to make them for ourselves and live with the consequences?

Don't worry, this isn't a big philosophical post.

My work recently has not been what you might call spectacularly interesting. But then again, when is work truly spectacularly interesting? Most of the time, when my line of work gets interesting it's usually best to batten down the hatches and curse the darkness.

So I thought I would soothe my feelings of career mediocrity by getting a film to watch. (My theory is that if it's a good enough opiate for the masses, why not?) SO I trudged to my local Giant Supermarket Of Choice, to see what they had on offer. (This is primarily because I don't feel like hauling my carcass down to the local cinema at 8:45 on a school night to see The Incredible Hulk, because the local Giant Cinema Chain Of Choice only has three showings a day. Indiana Jones? We'll put it on the hour, every hour, for eleven hours straight in it's first week. Incredible Hulk? Incredible what? Is that some sort of foreign film? We'll give it one screen, three times a day, because we don't like it.)

But, as people who know me will know, I am indecisive. In the end, it came down to a choice between Jumper and Thirty Days of Night. Alright, there was Cloverfield too, but I'm not really in the right frame of mind for that, right here, right now. So I thought I'd do the Millionaire thing and Phone a Friend.

And thus, I've just watched Thirty Days.

It's a little bleak. (And a little oddly-paced, too, but that's understandable.) Well, in fact, it's very bleak. Survival Horror is always going to be bleak, I grant you, but at least some films inject the occasional comedy moments to lighten the tension as foreplay for the next horror moment. If they did that in this film, then maybe I missed it, because apart from a chunky man attempting to fend off a horde of vampires with a combine-harvester-on-steroids - including a rather inpressive detorsofication! - then there isn't much humour on offer here. But, of course, that's the point. There's death, murder, loss, blood, fire and fighting; all the dark things that make us human. But there's not much of the other end of the spectrum of humanity.

Let's analyse the ending, for instance. It's the one truly heroic moment in the entire bloody film; not that there isn't heroism throughout, but hey, it's kind of lost in the mire and morass of gore and fear.

So, yes, Spoilers, in case you didn't guess.

How it ends is thus; the vampires, having wiped out all but six of the survivors, decide to burn the town to the ground to make sure it's thought that it was a horrific accident. Two of these survivors are trapped under a car wreck in the middle of the soon-to-be-burning street. The other four are in a big industrial building that's relatively secure. The sun they've been waiting for is about to come up, and the vampires are preparing to depart. One of the survivors in danger of burning is Josh Hartnett's Estranged Wife. So, in the cause of heroism, he does the only thing that comes to mind; he injects himself with infected blood, waits for the change to begin, and goes out to fight the Head Vampire to distract the pack for long enough for his wife to get to safety. And, lo, he has the shit kicked out of him, but in a surprise twise manages to punch his head through the back of the lead vampire's skull, and the rest depart because the sun's a-rising.

So Vampire Hartnett and J-H-E-W go out to watch the sun rise, one last time, because VH is about to get a terminal sunburn.

Which made me think; why not chain him up, get him undercover and wait for help? There's enough going on in the town that they could sedate him (if it worked), and put him under three or four filing cabinets, then get someone to look at him to see if the vampirism can be reversed.

But no, it's the big ashy beyonder for Vampire Hartnett, because a heroic sacrifice isn't complete without, well, a sacrifice...

And, in the end, I couldn't help but think; wouldn't Jumper have been more cheerful?