The coding blog of Alastair Smith, a software developer based in Cambridge, UK. Interested in DevOps, Azure, Kubernetes, .NET Core, and VueJS.
[3.5/5]
Generally, I don’t think I’m a huge fan of “genre” flicks. Ok, except maybe Sci-Fi, but even then the best ones are the ones that do something clever with the genre, like last year’s Moon. Daybreakers could have been that film in the vampire genre, but narrowly misses.
| [img_assist | nid=124 | title=Daybreakers | desc=We’re the ones holding the crossbows | link=none | align=center | width=560 | height=375] |
Having thoroughly enjoyed the first season of HBO’s True Blood on Channel 4 before Christmas, I’m quite vampired up. I can see the appeal of the Twilight movies to their target audience, but they are just too young, too tame, too teenage to spike my interest. So it was with some interest that I sat down to Daybreakers, an interesting mongrel of genres.
Billed as The Matrix meets 28 Days Later, there is quite a lot of science fiction in this vampire film, directed by the Australian twin brothers Michael and Peter Spierig. Set in 2019, the human race has been turned into vampires, and in the space of ten years has managed to adapt to their new circumstances. Life has been completely reworked to run at night: cars come with “day-driving mode” where thick UV shutters cover the windows and the driver navigates by camera; condominiums have shuttered underground parking and no windows; subways have been converted to subwalks; coffee shops serve blood; humans are farmed. Yes, that’s the Matrix parallel: here humans are farmed for their blood and not to produce electricity.
There is a problem, however: the number of humans in the farms is dwindling, mostly due to old age and lack of supply, and vampire mega-corp Bromley Marks — headed up by a devilish Sam Neill — is looking for solutions to the problem, notably a blood substitute. This is an idea that likely won’t be strange to most Americans and Australians: agricultural giants (or Big Farma, see what I did there?!?) of both countries have been punting substitutes for a while to shore up their business against future crop shortages.
The hunger is making Earth’s once human inhabitants more savage, and the malnutrition is starting to cause physical deformities and loss of mental focus. Some vampires have become desperate enough to feed off their own kind, if not themselves, with terrible and appalling results. The problem increases over the course of the film as a world blood shortage develops, leaving the price of blood too high for the average family of four.
Edward Dalton (the rather bland Ethan Hawke) is a haemotologist working on the blood substitute at Bromley Marks. It’s a thankless task: the most promising sample resulted in the violent (and comical) death of the test subject, and to make matters worse the CEO Charles Bromley (Neill) seems to be more interested in pumping up the price of the real thing. One night, Dalton encounters some humans (Claudia Karvan, Willem DaFoe) with a possible cure for the vampire disease, and sets to work productising it. It’s slow work, and in the meantime the human safehouse is compromised. As the film closes, an alternative method of propagating the cure has been discovered, and with it the bodies start to pile up, torn apart by the ravenous vampires.
It is this climax that mostly turned me off the film. The descent into violence and gore rather sullied an otherwise intelligent and well-developed idea. The script is fairly average: the characters are mostly under-developed, and as a result the cast struggles to make much of the material. The notable exception here is Willem DaFoe who manages to put together something from very little; Ethan Hawke is as wet he was in Gattaca (which was otherwise an excellent film).
Perhaps part of the problem is that there is too much crammed into Daybreakers for a 110-minute film: is it sci-fi, is it vampire, is it fantasy, is it making political statements? It valiantly attempts all four with some success, but it sacrifices the characters at the altar of pace. We get some fleeting glimpses into the depth of some of the characters (Dalton and Bromley most notably), but there is no real coherent arc to them; they end the film much as they started it.
Onto the niggles. Throughout the movie, I was bugged by the inconsistencies in the vampire myth espoused by Daybreakers. For example, the explanation for vampire’s well-known dislike for sunlight was due to the UV rays. Given that the fluorescent lights used to light their offices, subwalks and apartments also contain a high UV component. Details like this shouldn’t really be explained, because there’s not really a way to do so in a satisfactory, consistent matter; that’s why this falls into the sci-fi/fantasy pigeonhole.
Also, why was no attempt to contain the outbreak of vampirism made? National borders could have been shut, quarantine measures could have been implemented… I find it a leap of faith too far to believe that the infection spread quite that quickly. The blatant product placement of Chrysler also bugged me, as it left me wondering whether Dodge, VW, etc., had all been (literally) devoured in the infection.
In short, Daybreakers is an entertaining and above-average vampire flick that could have caused a serious re-think of expectations for the genre (and still might), but it ultimately left me feeling a little unfulfilled and wishing it could have done more.