REVIEW: Daybreakers (2009)

Brothers Michael and Peter Spierig, makers of Aussie zombie flick UNDEAD, have kicked of the year with a surprisingly good genre movie that is part sci-fi, horror, thriller, and action movie. DAYBREAKERS is a thinking person’s vampire flick with deliciously gory action, an underlying social message, lean direction, and best of all, no obnoxious product placement or pop music.

In the near future, Earth has been overtaken by a virus that has mutated most of the population into vampires. Rather than being the creatures that lurk in the night, they rule by night and cautiously travel about by day underground or in cars modified to block out deadly sunlight. Those few not affected by the virus are being hunted down and farmed on a mass scale for blood. Yet supplies are dwindling. With humanity facing extinction and vampires turning into mindless beasts without blood to feed on, vampires are racing to develop a blood substitute before time runs out.

Enter Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), a blood specialist at a blood production company and a reluctant vampire, who encounters a group of humans in hiding who have stumbled upon a cure for vampirism. When Edward agrees to help the humans try to figure out how to use this knowledge to save humanity this sets the stage for conflict with Edward’s boss, Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), a former terminal cancer patient-turned-immortal vampire who uses his private army to ensure that no cure is found and vampires continue to thrive.

A big part of the film’s success is the persistent tension that is maintained. This is remarkable given that it has turned the tables on vampire conventions by making most of these monsters appear ordinary, or rather paler reflections of humanity.

There is little fluff in this movie and the Speirig brothers keep the focus on what works. Pacing is tight. Acting performances from Hawke and fellow stars Willem Defoe and Claudia Karvan, both playing humans, are understated yet interesting. Sam Neill makes a terrific vampire villain with a real purpose for being a bad guy. It makes perfect sense that as a human facing death from cancer, he would embrace being an immortal vampire and do anything to ensure that it stays that way.

The film goes a couple steps further by making Neill’s onscreen daughter, played by Isabel Lucas (HOME AND AWAY), reject her father and become a tragic pawn in her father’s fight to hold on to his vampirism. This is nicely tied in with another familial conflict set between Hawke’s character and his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman) who appears willing to turn on his own brother to advance his career as a loyal member of Neill’s human hunting squad. If that isn’t enough, vampires in general turn on themselves as they round up starving vamps who have gone feral.

Behind this multifaceted conflict reside deeper philosophical questions that touch on race, equality and unchecked corporatism. The blood-producing corporation Sam Neill heads up could be representative of banking institutions, processed food companies, and cigarette makers that thrive on and encourage consumers’ bad habits and irresponsibility. When a better way of living is found, the corporation tries to stop it at all costs to maintain the status quo. In this way, DAYBREAKERS is a frighteningly accurate representation of society today, perhaps with human hunting squads standing in for corporate lobbyists. The fact that the film is still about vampires, and the copious amounts of bloodletting and bodily destruction that goes with it, makes it so much better as entertainment.

Unlike the action in the BLADE films which was rooted in the conventional vampire-versus-slayer conflict, action in DAYBREAKERS is more subtle and complex and less reliant on digital effects. There are scenes involving vampires exploding into balls of flame from stakes fired from crossbows and rampaging vampires feasting on victims with all the blood and guts a horror fan could crave yet this isn’t what drives the movie, nor is it overpowering. Rather, the fantasy elements are a bonus that happen to serve the story. This allows the filmmakers to end up with a gore-ridden bloodbath for an ending that is satisfying on a visceral and cerebral level.

Backing up the strong story and action is a welcome, dramatic orchestral score from Christopher Gordon. I had almost forgotten how much better a genre movie can be with real dramatic music tailored to the film. Along with vivid, earthy production design by George Liddle, who previously worked on the equally excellent genre film DARK CITY, everything in DAYBREAKERS really flows together well and I feel the filmmakers have successfully put forth their vision about as well as anyone could.

The only problem with DAYBREAKERS is the fact that it’s only 98 minutes. Even though the film barely wastes a single frame, the story feels abridged or compressed. The Spierig brothers, who also wrote the film, have mapped out a focused, enjoyable story within a very unwieldy premise that could have veered off course in so many ways but didn’t. They’re telling a big story that would have felt more complete in a broader format such as a novel or TV series. Despite this, they make it work. If the vacuous excesses of UNDERWORLD or the teen angst of TWILIGHT has left you feeling that there was nothing left to be done with vampires worth watching, you might want to give DAYBREAKERS a shot. Fans of more thoughtful and engaging sci-fi such as GATTICA and MINORITY REPORT should be pleased.

REVIEW: Daybreakers (2009), 8.0 out of 10 based on 3 ratings

by Mark Pollard

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Daybreakers (2009)  •  vampire