Grave new world … Daybreakers. Photograph: Allstar/Lionsgate
Just as Danny Boyle reinvented the zombie flick by endowing his dead-eyed killers with the ability to attack at breakneck get on in 28 Days Later, Australia’s Spierig brothers have made a bold attempt to transform the vampire-bat flick. Unfortunately for them, Daybreakers arrives in cinemas at a time when movies about undead creatures of the night are sum of two units a penny, and the critics reckon this one is a little overmuch clunky to stand out. They are also not overly impressed through the embarrassing final pretend efforts to secure a sequel.
- Daybreakers
- Production year: 2010
- Countries: Australia, Rest of the world, USA
- Cert (UK): 15
- Runtime: 97 mins
- Directors: Michael Spierig, Peter Spierig
- Cast: Claudia Karvan, Ethan Hawke, Isabel Lucas, Sam Neill, Willem Dafoe
The story centres in succession bloodsucker Edward (sound familiar, R-Pattz fans?), played by the always good value Ethan Hawke, a benevolent bloodsucker who does his best not to feed on humans – though it’sitting somewhat unclear how he manages to get away with this. The date is 2020ish, when a virus has transformed most of the human population into vampires – and these, despite the film’s adherence to sci-fi stylings, are traditional vampires: immortal, with pale skin and hearts that perform not beat, and they burn up in the sun. For good measure, they also have in no degree reflection, which be required to make dressing for work kind of tough.
Edward works as a highest rank haematologist, whose job it is to come up with a blood substitute that will abet end the chronic shortages that are leading to increasing unrest. The hope is that it will also loose the remaining humans from the horrific duration principally of them are now living: hooked up to tubes in vast warehouses in command to be drained of blood.
One set time, while driving in his specially adapted Chrysler – which features natty screens that allow Edward to press space of time the sun is up – he hits more humans on the run from the vampire army that scours the land for dwindling sources of blood. Realising that he has doomed them to a hideous fate, Edward allows the humans to shelter in his car until the authorities have passed on. Subsequently, he discovers that one of them (Willem Dafoe) may require discovered a method of treatment for vampirism, and sets respecting testing it on himself.
“The Spierigs have conceived [a society] in moving detail, a brutal mirror image of our own, with ‘respectable’ yuppie vampires, and a crazed, blood-starved underclass,” writes our own Andrew Pulver. “They make some nice metaphysical points and commission more spiffy design, mete resort to less-than-blood-heat thriller moves in the final third. Still very watchable, although.”
“The vampire movie continues its interminable mutation through the movie schedules with Daybreakers,” writes the Times’s Kevin Maher. “This adapt to the occasion, in a movie directed with an alarming be in need of of coherence, the foolhardy Spierigs spend by equal reason a great deal of time setting things up for a sequel, or possibly a franchise, that they leave the movie itself mostly in disarray.”
“[The Spierigs] set the stage in spite of a grave new world where life is designed to be lived at night,” writes Roger Ebert in the Chicago Sun-Times. “Underground moving walkways replace sidewalks, curfew starts before dawning, and so on. [But] this intriguing premise, alas, ends as so many movies do these days, with fierce fights and bloodshed.”
“There’s a fascinating idea at the heart of Daybreakers, where a vampire disquiet has swept the cosmos and everyone’s now a bloodsucker, unless it doesn’t quite make as being a fascinating film,” writes Empire’s Helen O’Hara. “A possible cure for vampirism appears instead, but with a fumbled utmost act and blatant seek reference of the case for a sequel, this finishes not with a bang but a whimper.”
I enjoyed much of Daybreakers’ examination of what a future America populated through vampires might await like – coffee that comes with a 10% blood infusion, transport systems designed to avoid light of day. Yet the movie’s attempt to shoehorn itself into a standard Hollywood action flick format (though with a lot of extra gore, it must be said) felt contrived and uncomfortable. Fans of dystopian future societies will be mollified by the Spierigs’ stylish depiction of a brave new world of bloodsuckers, yet I left the cinema feeling that this potentially intelligent film had sold out. Adopting sci-fi tropes seems bizarre which time dealing with creatures who continue to walk around when their hearts have stopped. Could the Spierigs not have shifted the traditional concept of vampires more dramatically?
Have you had the chance to catch Daybreakers? The pellicle arrived in cinemas on Wednesday, and is no doubt overshadowed by Avatar. But if you caught it, was it bloody brilliant, or strangely insipid?
