Re-populating's gonna be messy - Daybreakers' Review

Posted on January 17, 2010 - 1:58pm by michael Just when you thought that we had been having plenty of vampires to hold us over until the next Twilight movie comes out, the new year starts off with an unexpectedly impressive vampire flick that doesn't understand the meaning of horror clichs. While the Twilight films are concerned about the love lives of a few teenagers, Daybreakers widens the scope a little, focusing on the ultimate destruction of all of mankind. After all, vampires drink human blood, turning the humans into vampires in the process, and how long could that really go on before the vampires run out of humans? Far from squeezing another film into a tired genre, it's amazing this movie wasn't made a long time ago. The story takes place in the not too distant future. The world is wildly over-populated with vampires, humans are hunted like mall-goers in a George Romero movie and, as may be expected, blood prices are sky-rocketing. Less than 5% of the human population remains, which means that there are approximately 350 million or so humans sharing the planet with around six billion vampires. And if we can't get along when it's nothing but humans bickering over the planet, how do you think humans are going to do when hugely outnumbered by vampires who are starving for blood? In fact, one of the cool additions that the movie makes to the vampire genre is its description of what happens to vampires when they're deprived of blood for too long. I won't bother trying to describe it here, but trust me, it's not pretty. Vampires have taken over all aspects of every day life from Senators to physicians (they're not zombies, after all), and they are working on solutions to the problems they face. [caption id="attachment_68738" align="alignleft" width="350" caption="Ethan Hawke dismayed about what the world has come to."][/caption] There's lots of talk about a "blood substitute" which would negate the need for human blood, but testing remains unsuccessful. Vampire patients who are given the substitute tend to, you know, explode and such. So no luck there. Enter Ethan Hawke, who plays a vampire hemoglobin scientist, named Edward (what else?), one of the ones working on a blood substitute. A corporation called Bromley Marks, headed by a vampire named Charles (a gravelly-voiced Sam Neill), is funding the research for the substitute, but Charles and Edward have very different goals for the substitute. Soon Edward is approached by a group of humans led by a guy named Elvis (Willem Dafoe), who seem to have discovered a way to turn vampires back into humans using the power of the sun. It's painful as hell and leaves you without a heartbeat, but it's nice to be mortal again, and no longer forced to count on a disappearing resource. The question now is how to execute a large-scale transformation of vampires back into humans and, you know, start the war all over again. It's a strange shift in atmosphere to see vampires no longer the morbid, classy undead but as politicians and scientists operating casually in normal society, but it does take the genre in a new direction and I have no complaints about that. The movie occasionally teeters on the brink of a chasm of cheese in such scenes as where one grumpy vampire angrily demands more blood in his coffee (the new 5% of blood or less for each cup rule is not well received), but for the most part it's an interesting and creative take on what would happen next. Most vampire movies focus on the hunt of humans or the war between humans and vampires, but this one focuses on the aftermath of the outbreak, like Zombieland did about zombies. Humans have been all but wiped out, and the obvious food shortage becomes the main concern. I've heard complaints about this being a movie about too many vampires that really only shows that there are too many movies about vampires. I have to disagree with that. Of course, New Moon is still looming pretty big a the cineplexes, but Daybreakers could hardly be more different than the Twilight films and still remain in the same genre. It takes an old genre and breathes new life into it, kind of like the Reapers did in Blade II, and whenever that happens, I think it's worth noticing! The Bean Meter