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‘Daybreakers’: Do we really need another vampire movie?
Movie
Daybreakers
The year is 2019. A mysterious plague has swept over the earth, transforming the majority of the world's population into vampires. Humans are now an endangered, second-class species -- forced into hiding as they are hunted and farmed for vampire consumption to the brink of extinction. It's all up to Edward Dalton, a vampire researcher who refuses to feed on human blood, to perfect a blood substitute that might sustain vampires and spare the few remaining humans. But time and hope are running out -- until Ed meets Audrey, a human survivor who leads him to a startling medical breakthrough. Armed with knowledge that both humans and vampires will kill for, Ed must battle his own kind in a struggle that will decide the fate of the human race.
‘DAYBREAKERS’
Grade: D
Director: Michael and Peter Spierig
Running time: 1 hour, 38 minutes
Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language and brief nudity
By Roger Moore
In the “Daybreakers” future, the vampires have it all worked out.
No longer just nocturnal, they now run the show — day and night.
They’re not “cursed.” Not in their own eyes, anyway. Immortality and designer clothes, there isn’t a “True Blood” Louisiana redneck vampire to be found.
Can’t drive during the day? Fit cars with blackout windows and drive by video screen.
Need blood? It’s farmed in gigantic, dairy-styled processing facilities where the few surviving humans are captured and then sucked dry.
But that blood supply is about to run out. For the blood baron (Sam Neill), that’s a cause for concern. He has his best man on it, hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke, pale and fanged). Edward will find a blood substitute, something they can bottle like pinot noir, something red and yummy that Vampire Planet can spritz into its morning espresso. Something that will keep all the vampires from devolving into gnarly, uncivilized wraiths, preying on one another and ease Edward’s anti-blood sucking conscience.
“Daybreakers” is a stylish but unavoidably silly sci-fi vampire thriller shot in that “Matrix”/“Gattaca” futurescape of Australia. German co- directors, the Spierig brothers, dazzle us with the inventiveness of this post-human world where Uncle Sam has fangs (“Capture Humans!” read the posters) and that line at the coffee bar could turn deadly, and not just because these blood-suckers need their caffeine.
Then Edward stumbles into the human underground (Willem Dafoe, with a crossbow, and Claudia Karvan), survivors holding out against extinction. Whatever the movie was, it becomes a too-conventional hunters- hunted “rebels” tale with Hawke stuck listening to human lines such as these: “We’ve been searching for vampires we can trust.” And “My friends call me Elvis!”
But those moments are lost once the standard-issue explode-in-sunlight/stake-through-the-heart business revs up. “Daybreakers” reminds us that from “Twilight” to “Underworld,” “True Blood” to “The Vampire Diaries,” this is one genre where supply has utterly overwhelmed demand.