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DVD: Daybreakers

Daybreakers is, in turn, a fascinating vampire universe, a more mundane vampire film, and ultimately an utter mess of a vampire flick. Which is too bad, because it could have been an utterly awesome vampire film.

Of late, the vampire has been treated pretty shabbily.  They’re becoming emo pansies, rather than the bad-ass blood-thirsty (literally) killers that they truly are.  Most will blame the Twilight books and films, and maybe they’re right. Wherever it began, however, it’s become an epidemic. The results are well-chronicled in an article over an io9, “I demand better vampires.”

Daybreakers might have been the film to fill that demand. It could even have been the setup for the vampire TV series. Its possibilities were endless, and maybe still are.

The film takes place in the near future. For reasons not fully explained, though hinted at during the opening title sequence, most of the world’s population have become vampires. The few remaining humans are either kept in special farms, slowly drained of their blood, or are in hiding. The vampires, of course, are hunting the ones in hiding to add them to the ones who are in the farms.

With quick economy, the film gives us a tour of a world transformed. These vampires don’t sparkled in the sunlight, they burst into flame and disintegrate. During the day, everyone must remain indoors. Thus, “normal” working hours are at night, and most sleep by day. There’s an industry in sealing up homes, cars, and even providing an underground “subwalk” for moving about during the day.

There’s a beautiful darkness to the vampire world the filmmakers have created. It’s not the standard feeling of night that you see in most films, there’s a difference to how things are lit, how people act. It’s an accrual of little things, from the obvious such as blood being served in coffee, the way vampire eyes gleam in the dark, and the subtle, such as the enclosed “sky bridges” that link skyscrapers or how everyone smokes because, hey, vampires are immortal. All in all, I thought it was wonderful, and one of the reasons the film begins to damn well.

Alas, it can’t follow through from its brilliant beginnings. Ethan Hawke plays a vampire researching a blood substitute. It doesn’t take advanced statistical evidence to determine that with vampires outnumbering humans by a significant margin (less than 5% remain human) there isn’t enough blood to go around. Thus, a blood substitute becomes the only way the vampire species will survive.

Hawke is a classic, angst-ridden vampire. He hates drinking human blood, despite the fact that his failure to do so will cause him to degenerate into a “subsider,” a mindless creature that only knows to feed. And feed. And feed some more. He also hates to see what is being done to humans, with the added complication that his brother is in the military and one of its best human-hunters.

All of this is wonderful. I didn’t even mind the standard left-leaning tropes about scarcity of resources and the evils of capitalism. I didn’t mind because they were well done and are actually integral to the story being told. I never felt lectured or talked down to; I bought into the setup and things flowed naturally from there.

No, Daybreakers starts to go astray when we meet the humans, led by Willem Defoe, who are working on a cure. Not that working on a cure is a bad idea, it’s just that here the film starts to go off the rails. That wonderful vampire world, with everyone living in the dark, comes out into the daylight, and the “rules” involving vampires start to become arbitrary. Vampires can come out in the day, as long as they stay in shadows and aren’t in direct sunlight. Huh? How does that work?

Then there’s the matter of crossbows and wooden arrows. These substitute for wooden stakes. They can wound vampires; apparently only a heart-shot will kill the vampire (actually makes them explode in a fireball). In a night-time battle with vampires, humans apparently have night vision because they are scoring heart-shots right and left while shooting blindly into the dark.

The silliness and inconsistencies begin to mount and your head starts to hurt. It becomes grotesque, literally a blood bath, by the film’s end, concluding on a singularly awful note. All of the film’s promise is not just lost, it’s squandered.

Daybreakers suffers from its filmmakers inability to follow through on their setup. It feels like two or three films jammed together and none of them are given proper attention.

By the awful ending, we’re left with a setup for a sequel which will probably never get made. Which is actually a good thing, because I want to linger on the setup, on a  world turned upside-down, where vampires – real honest to keep-me-out-of-the-sun-I’ll-rip-your-throat-out vampires – rule the world.

If we’re lucky, some cable network will scoop this up, reset it to that beginning, and we’ll have the basis of a great vampire series. If that happens, all the glitter wimps had better start running.

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