Daybreakers
Director: The Spierig Brothers
Starring: Sam Neill, Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe
Synopsis: An alternate world, where vampires outnumber humans, struggles with an impending shortage of blood.
Verdict: In the movie’s 90-minute running time, there are perhaps five minutes of footage that won’t make you want to kill yourself.
What if someone told you there was a movie concerning an alternate reality where everyone on Earth was a vampire? How would you react? If you were me, you’d probably wave your hands in the air and scream, “Oh, my God! Oh, my God!” Now, what if that same person told you that said movie inexplicably found a way to make the very idea of vampires boring as hell?
That’s pretty much how it goes with Daybreakers, the new film from the Brothers Spierig, the same folks responsible for the totally gorey and hilarious homage to Peter Jackson, Undead. Their new film is about a society where, well, the majority of the population has turned into vampires. The dwindling human population is their cattle, captured, hooked up to machines, and sucked dry of all the gooey red stuff inside of them. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) works for the corporation tasked with finding a suitable alternative to human blood, since the human population is falling to zero. One day, Dalton encounters a group of humans, instantly sympathizes with them because he drinks animal blood just like Edward “Homo Explosion” Cullen, and embarks on a journey to solve the “blood” problem – one way or another.

A stupid image from this stupid movie, stupid.
The only problem with all this is that at no point was I, the viewer, given a single reason to care about what transpired on screen. How did we, as a movie-going public, move from a silent masterpiece like Nosferatu, whose title character is a bald, feral ghoul who can illicit terror simply by moving from one side of the screen to the other, to a movie where vampires are unsympathetic corporate fat cats who look human, act human, live like humans, and for all intents and purposes might as well be human? Where’s the horror in that? It’s not scary.
It doesn’t help matters much that the script is utterly moronic. You should probably skip the rest of this review if you plan on watching the movie because I’m just going to spoil the whole stupid thing. At the beginning of the movie, we witness a vampire write a suicide note, then off herself by going out into the sunlight, or so the directors would like us to believe. As Dalton discovers later in the film, immolation by sunlight returns a vampire to human form, but only as long as they have some water on hand to keep from overcooking. Continue reading »