Daybreakers

Rated R for violence, language, brief nudity

Starring Ethan Hawke, Willem Dafoe, Claudia Karvan, Sam Neill

In the year 2019, most of the world's population has been turned into vampires due to a pandemic disease. Fortunately though, they have been able to carry out their day to day lives due to working the 9pm-5am shifts and using blackout glass for houses and cars. While pharmaceutical company Bromley Marks harvests the humans that are found for their blood, due to the growing number of vampires though, they are beginning to run short on blood supply, creating a lesser sub-specie - the aggressive bat-like sub-siders. Several Bromley Marks scientists are hematologists and have been trying to create a suitable blood substitute, one of whom is Edward Dalton. Dalton, we learn, was unwillingly turned and would much rather try and find a cure, as he much preferred his human life and has a compassion for humans (he won't drink human blood). After a chance encounter with a small group of humans, he learns one of them used to a vampire but was cured. He disappears with them, in order to replicate the cure and bring it to Bromley Marks, however not everyone is as excited for a cure as he is.

Daybreakers has an interesting plot and while it has a message, it's not quite as "in your face" as Avatar's was. The concept is simple - over indulgence can lead to a downfall in society. And while there might be a solution to revert back to how things were before, those that profit now while the rest suffer might not be in favor of giving up their current lifestyle for the better of mankind. It was also an interesting take on the vampire lore - something popular today blended with a situation we can certainly identify with! (Think of our current economic state and housing crisis and how some big businesses are doing okay, while the rest of us are not).

My only complaint was that I thought the last 10 minutes or so of the film were dumb. They spend a good portion of the film developing the cure and coming up with a clever way to get into Bromley Marks unharmed and spread it, and in a matter of minutes we're back to where we were 20-30 minutes ago in the film. The rest of the film, I thought, was pretty good though - Sam Neill (remember him from Jurassic Park?) makes a good villain, and both Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe did some really good acting!

If you like vampire films, this might be one you'd like to check out. But be careful, as it may make you think!