Daybreakers

***WARNING SPOILERS AHEAD***

Vampires are all the rage these days in both the theatre and on TV.  Going into this movie I didn’t know what to expect.  Was this going to be a re-hash of the many vampire movies that came before? Pleasantly it was not.  

In this world, vampires are the dominant species. They run the cities, the government, the military, and go to work every day.  Almost everyone is a vampire, due to an unspecified “pandemic” that is only hinted at in the movie.  And herein lies the problem.  Vampires need human blood to survive.  With almost everybody a vampire, there just isn’t enough human blood to go around.  Humans are a rare and hot commodity and the military is tasked with hunting them down to fill their blood repositories. 

Set in a stylized World War II-esque backdrop (although the year is 2019), blood is rationed to the vampire populace by the cup.  As the movie begins, blood is so scarce that the blood being rationed is only 20% pure. Those who do not or cannot feed on blood, due to privilege and other societal factors, begin to devolve into giant predatory bat-like creatures that become a "menace to society". 

Where would vampires be without science?  The solution to the dwindling food supply is to create a “blood substitute”.  After countless trials they were still nowhere near finding a viable solution. As fate would have it, the altruistic lead vampire scientist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) ends up meeting a band of humans led by Audrey (Claudia Karvan) who show him an alternative.  Here we meet Elvis (Willem Defoe), a former vampire who can potentially save the human race. 

If you were a vampire and you were offered a “cure” would you take it?  Take a minute and think about it. Who wants to give up the illusion of immortality; to be immune to sickness and disease, to exist forever without aging, to have superhuman abilities, to have the insatiable craving for human blood and to never see the light of day without bursting into flame?   What no one?

Why is this black man in this film?  To die of course.  (Actor--Christopher Kirby)

I’ll spare you the descriptions of the gory blood bath that ensues over the unforeseen repercussions of this cure.

And in the end, our trio of saviors, ride off into the sunset in a world filled with vampires with a cure that nobody wants.  Although the conclusion was unsatisfying to me, I liked the movie for being innovative.  Certainly worth a DVD rental. I’ll give it 3.5 fingers out of 5.