Daybreakers

I really just don’t get it. I never thought vampires were cool. I think stylistically the original “Nosferatu” is cool, as well as Herzog’s remake which reinvigorates the previous film. I don’t even think I could name another vampire movie off the top of my head which I like. First off, they aren’t scary because vampires aren’t real. Second, I never really liked all the eroticism that is associated with them, I just find it unnerving. I could never see how something rooted in the macabre could be contextualized in romance. I have never seen “Twilight” and I have no desire to. Like I said I don’t get it, I don’t get a lot of things and the new vampire craze is just one of them. The one result “Twilight’s” success has wrought is that it made the Hollywood movie machine think “Well people seem to like this movie about unrequited teenage love, so lets make a shit ton of vamp movies why not?” and make them they did, missing the point as usual. The newest one I was actually looking forward to. I thought it would be a new twist on a suddenly too familiar genre, “Daybreakers.”

“Daybreakers” is about a world where vampires are now the majority and humans are farmed for blood to sustain the population. A very intriguing idea of what a world in which vampires exist might be. This idea is rich. It could be about class hierarchy, and it could be about unsustainable resources, or race relations. It could have been a movie like “District 9,” or “Gattaca,” with implications on what’s happening with the world today. It could have been stylish and revealing like “Dark City.” Instead it wasn’t really like any of those things. It just degraded into a sub par action movie with a lot of gross-out moments that are bloody and startling, but actually make the movie kind of suck (heh…). This idea is fertile ground to make a movie that’s about something, but in the end it just ends up being about how evil capitalism is. For an industry that abuses the system as much as any, it is quite puzzling why they make so many movies about how evil that system is. I think Ethan Hawke is generally a good actor, not so much in this, but in lots of stuff and he should be in more good movies. Willem Dafoe is one of the best actors there is, but he phones it in here. To quote him, watching this movie is as terrible “as riding bareback on a 5 dollar whore;” I don’t know who wrote that line but it sealed this movies fate as being pretty bad.

So much of the story doesn’t really make any sense. For example, vampires can’t go out during the day but humans can, so why wouldn’t humans just kill as many vampires as they can when the suns up and then hide out every night. Well, the reason is that there wouldn’t be a movie, so I will let that one slide since I have to sit there watching for another hour. Also the cure that they find which resolves the movie doesn’t really make any sense either. But who cares, either the movie is going to be about something or it’s going to be about nothing and entertain the shit out of me anyway. This accomplishes neither very well. But I will say that I didn’t hate it. It wasn’t good but at least I wasn’t bored like another recent movie I saw.