Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
1/10/10
I can just imagine brothers
Michael and Peter Spierig sitting someone down to explain their concern
about the planet's dwindling natural resources. “Look,” they might
say, “imagine that the human race was all vampires, and that oil was blood.”
At that moment, perhaps, they'd have looked to each other, forgotten about
their clueless friend and raced off to their laptops. Their new movie
Daybreakers riffs on that idea, a world of vampires crumbling as
the human blood they need to survive slowly runs out, with great detail
and precision for a hair over 90 minutes. It's an interesting, thoughtful
bloodbath that never quite catches fire because its cool, distant characters
are a tad, er, bloodless. But when it's done, you'll know you've
been told a tale, and it's quite rare to see a horror movie this smart.
In the year 2019, a virus
that began sweeping the Earth ten years earlier has turned essentially
the entire planet into vampires. Human civilization has continued
under their rule with just a few adjustments: no one goes out during
the day (although cars with blacked-out windows and external cameras for
navigation are available if you need to get somewhere) and it's the military's
primary mission to hunt down the remaining humans so they can be farmed
for the blood everyone needs to survive. It's a pyramid scheme that's
quickly turned against the vampire majority, and the results of going without
blood are beginning to become clear: you turn from Lestat into Nosferatu.
The government keeps cutting the blood rations, making everyone hungrier
and hungrier while hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) leads a team
working toward a blood substitute that will allow the vampires to survive
without relying on humans. He hopes it will allow the two species
to live in peace, but his boss Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) has other ideas:
he still expects to market human blood as a delicacy while the masses who
can't afford it settle for his artificial slop. But Edward hasn't
been able to deliver, and the numbers of mutated, mindless vamps prowling
the sewers are swelling, leading to more and more attacks on civilians
aboveground. Edward has a chance meeting with fleeing human Audrey
Bennett (Claudia Karvan) which persuades her he's the one her human community
has been looking for. She introduces Edward to Lionel Cormac (Willem
Dafoe), also known as Elvis. He's human, but used to be a vampire.
Edward studies this seeming impossibility looking for a vampirism cure
as the military, led by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman), closes in.
And they're getting VERY hungry...
The Spierig Brothers (who
worked on the special effects in addition to their writing and directing
duties) have given the notion of a vampire world a LOT of thought, and
its construction in general (the skywalks that connect all the city's skyscrapers,
for instance, so no one has to walk out in the lethal daylight to get from
one to the other) and metaphor for environmental doom in particular is
a wonderfully unique sci-fi creation. We are, they tell us, already
vampires to a degree that far less would change than you'd think.
Pundits debate the unthinkable on cable news channels, children incapable
of growing up gather to pretend they're adults by engaging in our vices,
and the wealthy suck all vital resources dry while an underclass starves
and mutates into killers. Same old same old, right? Bathed
in a perpetually washed-out blue (thanks to Ben Nott's standout cinematography),
this world goes on as a smug satire of the human race that gave way to
these bloodsuckers, confident that they'll never grow old and never die
even as the forces that will kill them march forward in plain sight.
And Daybreakers isn't one of those sci-fi movies that hints at a
challenging interpretation in a scene or two and then leaves you to do
the work yourself. Here, the metaphor is the show.
A pity the story that takes
place within that metaphor isn't more compelling. Oh, it's interesting,
to be sure, and I really liked the way Hawke's self-loathing vampire hematologist
attacks the question of what cured Elvis and how to transmit that cure
to others like an actual scientist rather than an action hero in a lab
coat. But the characters aren't much outside of what they represent,
and while the cast is full of good actors doing their best, I didn't really
get a sense that there's much difference between being human or vampire
other than the question of whether you need Chrysler's snazzy new vampire
car (way to throw in with the inhuman bloodsuckers, corporate sponsor!)
or can get a tan or not. Making Elvis and Audry's human community
seem a little more human would have gone a long way, and while Edward sure
does hate being a vampire, we don't get a chance to feel what he might
have lost when his brother turned him.
But Daybreakers does
get the other half of the story chillingly right, with the collapse of
vampire society while those cable channels keep worrying about the effects
the mutating masses will have on the stock market rendered with great skill.
Thanks to some first-rate makeup effects and great visual ideas for how
the illusion of humanity gives way to pure animal hunger (it starts with
pointy ears and gets much worse from there), we watch with anxiety as the
characters' world slips away. Ruthless decisions are made about what
to do with the growing underclass of monsters, as though that will somehow
save the temporary survivors. And there's a great subplot of Shakespearian
heartbreak in which Bromley recovers his stubornly human daughter (Isabel
Lucas) and tries to prove to her how great it is to be a vampire, with
tragic, gruesome results. Neill and Lucas give the movie's best performances,
he all corrupt obliviousness, and she holding firm to her convictions to
their horrific end. You'd never imagine that Lucas was the same actress
as the blond bombshell who appeared in Transformers:
Revenge of the Fallen over the summer: she's a talent to watch.
Following the film's ruthless worldview to the end, the climax has a brutal
logic that proves its never a good idea to be part of the front line infantry.
Unlike just about every other
movie ever released on the first Friday of a new movie year, Daybreakers'
assets are primarily cerebral, and those disgusted with the romanticizing
of vampires in the Twilight franchise will delight to see their
status as brutal bloodsuckers restored. Perhaps the movie's greatest
problem is the Catch 22 at its heart: we have met the enemy and they
are us. Enjoy the blood in your coffee while you can. |
