Daybreakers should be exactly the kind of palate-cleansing fluffy actioner that comes out in January. For large swaths, it is. Unfortunately, it's also a metaphor about dwindling resources that never quite gets out of the gate.A 2009 plague has turned the vast majority of Earth's human population into vampires, and, by 2019, the world is on the brink of devastating blood shortage (by extermination the human race). Chief Hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) has been tasked with finding a suitable blood substitute, but he gets caught up with a group of rebel humans (led by Willem Dafoe and Claudia Karvan) first. Turns out they have something better on offer: a cure.
Yes, twin writer-director team Michael and Peter Spierig, the world needed another golden-eyed vampire named Edward who doesn't drink human blood and wants to be human again and (maybe) falls for a brown haired lady. Okay, he's not really like that Edward. I just found it momentarily distracting.
Though the vampires are actually kind of pathetic (aside from arresting the aging process and accelerated healing, they have no special abilities to speak of. At only ten years on, immortality's not even guaranteed) and the dialogue, particularly Dafoe's, is often ridiculous, it works out. The filmmakers hosted a contest on Worth1000 to come up with the design for a world were vampires ruled, resulting in a sleek, modern 1930s twist (not unlike personal Hawke fav Gattaca), and it's filled to the brim with cool ideas about how such a world would work: specially tinted windows and small cameras allow vampires to drive in daylight and see themselves without mirrors, the subwalk connects the city for easy pedestrian travel, blood is treated like cream for coffee.
But for all this, there's little actual thrill or action to suspend the viewer in this world, and many of the connections between characters aren't drawn well enough to keep the viewer's attention there either (though one fight between Edward and his brother Michael Dorman smarted). Still, it's awfully cool to think about. And did I mention that when the vampires are staked, they explode? C+
What got to me was the no-reflection thing. I was willing to suspend my disbelief well enough to let the movie play out... until the fundamental laws of physics got thrown out the window.
ReplyDeleteOkay, plague somehow causes symptoms stereotypical of fictional vampirism and nobody questions the coincidence. Fine.
But the idea that light no longer refracts off their faces? Come on!
Okay, fine, let's suppose, miracle of miracles, that light doesn't refract off of their faces anymore.
Then how the bloody hell can we see them? How can they see each other, standing, face to face, in the room? Light doesn't refract anymore, so I guess it's just a bunch of empty suits walking around the subwalk. Bah! Humbug!
Oh, and needless to say modern science can create materials that don't quite refract light, but they ain't no faces, and if they don't refract light, then we don't see 'em neither.
ReplyDeletehttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metamaterial
I think it's possible that whomever came up with the whole "vampires don't have reflections" idea before we understood the science behind such things. It was probably a metaphor.
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