Daybreakers

It's feels like Blade at the onset, only with more sophisticated and sort of advanced designs and ideas. Daybreakers is a vampire flick, but you will not find romance here, nor Edward Cullen.

Ten years into the future, there is only a handful of humans, most of them hiding in shelters. That is, if they're not hanging by tubes in a lab as blood is harvested from their veins to meet the needs of the vampire-populated world. Ed Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a hesitant vamp sympathetic to humans. He's also a hematologist finding a special blood substitute to make up for the deteriorating supply. But he and his new-found human friends find a “cure” for being a vampire that could save all their problems.

The idea and attention to details of a vampire's life really impresses here: how a vampire can drive under the sun in his car untouched by the UV rays, or how a vampire can check in his rear-view mirror how his ear looks like even without a reflection, or how a vampire can buy a cup of blood-infused coffee, just like ordering at Starbucks. Human sacrifice may very well be its redeeming factor, but not enough to save the film. It seems that the idea was to put back real “reel” vampires on the big screen; only it lacks decent storytelling.

Actors (Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill) are a waste of talent here; there was no character or story for their full potential to soar. Really, even the action sequences were mainly military vamps (using tranquilizer guns) shooting humans (using Van Helsing-sort-of-stakes) and vice versa. I guess the movie’s reel vamps checked their agility and super speed and strength at the door. Either that, or with all the technology they presented, the military vamps were left out without funding.

But I wonder: if "immortality is the miracle" (or so Neill’s blood-thirsty character says), what would a vampire not give to be alive again? Life is not meant to be unending. It's because it has an end that we can live in its moments. (Yes, the Kodak moments. Eww, harharhar.)


Daybreakers gets five out of ten, for trying to be a watchable action-suspense vampire movie.


*photo from allmoviephoto.com