Today I had the misfortune of watching Daybreakers, a film that I was hoping could recover vampires’ castrated balls from the Twilight-saga. Boy was I mistaken.
The beginning of the movie has promise. The Spierig brothers have an interesting visual style and compose a world that is both futuristic and empty of human life. Streets are barren during the day while vampires crowd in the sub-walk, sipping on lattes mixed with blood and commuting to work. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) enters the movie immaculately dressed, and even manages to almost pull off wearing his fedora with vampiric charisma. You see, Edward is a very important vampire; he is a hematologist working for a company to develop synthetic blood (True Blood?), which is vital as the human population, who the vampires hunt down and farm for blood, is running scarce.
So after the first few minutes we have a world populated with vampires who hunt down and use humans for their blood, and Ethan Hawke in a fedora. What could go wrong?
Turns out a lot of things. In the vein of recent pussified vampire mythology, which I’m blaming Twilight for, Edward does not want to farm humans, or even drink their blood. Instead, he drinks pig blood and wants to help the humans out. Fortunately for him, he runs into a group of humans on the run, and, being the good-loving vamp that he is, decides not to turn them in. The humans, led by Lisa Barrett (Harriet Minto-Day), decide that this good, loving vampire can help them out, and soon they’re working together to cure vampirism. Turns out, none other than ‘Elvis’ (Willem Dafoe) has gone from being a human to a vampire and back again.
How did he cure his horrible immortal disease, you ask? Why, simple, by being flung out the front window of a car, burning up in the sun, and landing in a pond, which extinguished the flames. . .and then he was human. I shit you not. The movie proposes that if you find yourself cursed as a vampire, all you need to do is this: go out in the sun and set yourself on fire, then extinguish the flames before you die. BAM, human again. I can’t figure out whether this is better or worse than sparkling in the sun. At least the Spierig brothers got the burning up thing right.
OK, if you’re still convinced that this movie might be good (why?) then I’ll go on. The blood shortage is causing the vampiric population to turn into hideous beasts with super strength and brutality (cause actually, the vampires in the movie are neither very strong nor very mean, just humans who can’t go out during the day). This shortage is obviously meant to parallel other resource shortages in a capitalist economy, maybe oil? Is that too obvious? And guess who the villain is. Yep, that’s right, the evil pharmaceutical corporation who is harvesting humans and distributing their blood. Ok, it seems like the Spierig brothers are hitting the viewer on the head with their political message, but actually the message is somehow presented in a tactless fashion that simultaneously doesn’t give it any urgency.
The fact is that there are so many things wrong with this movie, from the plot that doesn’t resolve itself (at all) to the ridiculous and completely out of place speeches that Willem Dafoe’s character randomly gives throughout the movies. This movie doesn’t deserve a ticket purchase, and maybe not even of a rental, which is sad because it’s built on such an interesting premise and begins with a great art style. However, by the end of the movie, I realized that even if I were vampiric and immortal, I still wouldn’t want to waste my time on this film.
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