Daybreakers

Home
Smell the Movies
Smell the TV

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

Year:	2009
Country of origin:	Australia / USA
Director:	Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
Genre:	Average vampire fare
Starring:	Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill,  Claudia Karvan
Rating:	3/5
IMDB link:	http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0433362/
Tagline:	In 2019, the most precious natural resource... is us.
Favourite line:	"Living in a world where vampires are the dominant species is about as safe as bare backing a 5 dollar whore."

Polished modern vampire movie.

The plot:
It’s 2019, and the world is a changed place. Humanity has been all but wiped out, transformed into vampires, the result of a plague carried by a vampire bat and an experiment gone wrong.
Now, the vampires that humanity seeded are on the verge of starvation for, as the humans are killed off one by one, so the vampires’ source of food – human blood - is duly exhausted.
Haematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a vampire, conducts experiments to try to find a synthetic alternative to real blood and, in his heart, he truly pities humanity, considering the vampirism that has run riot as nought but a disease, to be cured; eradicated.
When Dalton encounters a rare band of free humans, they convince him that their cause is just and, after discovering the cure for vampirism to be the sun itself, Dalton and his new found human chums set about on a quest to rid the world of the vampiric menace.

It’s good this, but lacks real bite.
(Did you see what I did there? Eh?)
With reasonably high production standards, a good cast including Hawke, Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill, and a decent vision of a future world, this really should set the pulse racing. Trouble is, somehow the scenario is stripped of any sense of urgency or menace by a directorial style that is strangely anaemic, almost sterile, so it seems as if you are watching it through a vacuum, all atmosphere sucked out of it.
The performances are uniformly solid, and the splatter levels are relatively high, for something this mainstream, but there is the nagging suspicion that this really is a retread of stuff that’s gone before, rather than anything that is truly trying to break new ground.
Reminiscent, tonally at least, of Nochnoy Dozor (Night Watch), the directors here share Timur Bekmambetov’s struggles to translate action and high drama into anything that resonates on an emotional level. The Spierig brothers, like Bekmambetov, seem under the impression that just pointing a camera at something, then doing the real work in post-edit is the way to make movies and, sadly, that is just no the case, fellas.
Borrowing liberally from the 1989, Anthony Hickox directed Bruce Campbell-a-thon Sundown: A Vampire in Retreat, this desperately wants to be a cult movie in its own right, but simply feels far too commercial, far too corporate for that ever to be a reality.
A four or five out of ten film, for the most part, this is elevated by a splatterific last ten minutes that is rather pleasing to the eye, despite the inclusion of the truly horrific CGI-monster.
Average fodder, this.