Daybreakers

Title: Daybreakers
Year: 2009
Director: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
Writer: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
Starring: Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Sam Neill, Isabel Lucas, Claudia Karvan
MPAA Rating: R, strong bloody violence, language and brief nudity
Runtime: 98 min
Major Awards: –
IMDb Rating: 6.7
Rotten Tomatoes: 67%

Daybreakers is a film I liked more than I probably should, mostly because it was so much more than I thought it would turn out to be. I was thinking it wouldn’t be good because for one, it didn’t seem like a great vampire flick, and secondly, as I’m sure most would agree, I’ve just about had it with the vampires, at least until True Blood returns in June, but Daybreakers surprised me, it didn’t turn out to be just another vampire flick, it was something else, and with the sci-fi element it had going for it, it was something I found myself enjoying.

The plot is the following: a decade from now the vast majority of the world’s population are vampires, and the remaining humans are on the run from the hungry beasts. There’s a corporation, though, Bromsley Marks, which is a supplier of blood and which is trying to create a substitute that will have the same effect, Ethan Hawke’s character, Edward, works at Bromsley Marks.

I like the world created in Daybreakers, I think its fun how underground tunnels now replace sidewalks, mostly because it looks damn well in the style the Spierig brothers chose to shot it, and I like the human characters, especially Elvis, the Willem Dafoe character who has the cheap vampirism antidote, and I like how the vampires are portrayed as people, blood is expensive it seems, and people with no money will kill to feed their family, because that’s literally what they need to do.

Again, Daybreakers isn’t the typical vampire movie you’d expect these days, in that sense its really refreshing, but nevertheless, it’s not really great, its just okay, an,d for a vampire-related form of media, that’s as much as one can hope for in these fang-obsessed days we live in.

Grade: B