Daybreakers
Release Date: Friday, January 8th 2010,
Two-time
Academy Award nominee Ethan Hawke plays Ed, a researcher in the year
2017, in which an unknown plague has transformed the world's population
into vampires. As the human population nears extinction, vampires must
capture and farm every remaining human, or find a blood substitute
before time runs out. However, a covert group of vampires makes a
remarkable discovery, one which has the power to save the human race.
Building on the genre-clash crossover theme
that was solidly established the first night of TIFF's Midnight Madness
with the slasher flick cum teen girl comedy Jennifer's Body, programmer
Colin Geddes has delivered another interesting hybrid: the futuristic,
sci-fi-vampire film Daybreakers.
Set 10 years into the future and after the bat-spawned vampire
plague converted the vast majority of humans into blood-sucking
chain-smoking nocturnal regular joes who have to shave by watching
themselves in a video feed, Daybreakers is directed by the twin Spierig
brothers. They're MM vets, these dudes, as their last film (2003's
Undead) famously closed out the beloved Uptown theatre here in Toronto,
the still-mourned theatre that was home to the midnight TIFF screenings
before they moved to the cavernous, impersonal and enormous Ryerson
hall.
Ethan Hawke plays vampire Edward, the reticent, kind-hearted Chief
Hematologist of the giant multi-national corporation tasked with
farming the remaining few humans for their blood and developing a
substitute to feed the billions of vampires teetering on the edge of
starvation as resources dwindle.
The film is a neat enough allegory any
number of take-your-pick conservation issues, food, water, oil; one of
the things that makes the film work is that it's sci-fi of the best
kind, true speculative fiction that talks about what's happening now,
or could happen soon, through a lens that both abstracts it slightly
and makes it easier (if at times much too much and too obvious) to see.
The Spierig bros' film is entertaining from the start, it takes an
immediate heart-warming leap into territory any genre film-lover will
like. The film says "ok, this is a vampire movie, it's in the future,
the humans lost, the vampires have their own society now" and instead
of just telling that story, the story of the battle, Daybreakers takes
that as pat and asks "ok, now that you've accepted that in the
prologue, what happens to vampire society when it runs out of blood?".
It's joyous just in its premise, so reminiscent and redolent of true
movie-monster-nerd basement fantasy conversations about who would win
between Dracula and Predator or what would happen if the Nazis had
werewolf soldiers that any number of technical shortcomings, like a
jumbled, poorly paced and overlong second act or a handful of
not-very-good performances can be overlooked easily and gladly. While
much of the film feels (and not just due to the presence of Ethan
Hawke, who oddly spends the last half an hour of the film looking
exactly like Han Solo) like vampire Gattaca as the machinations of the
rebel-underground-vs-evil-corporate-overlords-and-there's-also-a-family-betrayal-subplot
revolve, there are a handful of truly scary, truly sublime scenes of
the best kind of vampire carnage, gory and stylish and terrifying.
For
lovers like me of genre freakouts, Daybreakers offers a flawed but
thoroughly enjoyable, happy-making trip, one foot firmly in vampire
flick tradition and the other in entertaining, creative and original
speculative territory. I was sold the moment I didn't see Ethan Hawke's
reflection in the rear view mirror of a sleek, futured-up Chevy
cruising through the best Blade Runner future two Australian indie
filmmaker brothers could create. 8.1/10.
Director: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
Cast:
Ethan Hawke,
Willem Dafoe,
Michael Dorman,
Claudia Karvan,
Sam Neill,
Isabel Lucas,
Vince Colosimo,
Paul Sonkkila
