film reviews

It is good to be a vampire right now, everyone seems to either want to write a novel about you or make a movie about, and sometimes both. Vampire stories are for the most part the same, they are outcast who hide among us, if they didn’t they would be hunted and killed. What if though it was the other way around? What if Vampires ran the world and it was the humans who were hiding? That is the premise of the movie Daybreakers , which is the brainchild of the Spierig brothers. It is 2019 and the world is run by vampires and they harvest humans for their blood, so that they can survive. That blood supply is starting to run low, and humans are close to being extinct, so the vampires are trying to find a substitute for blood. That is where we meet Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), Dalton is a scientist who is trying to find that substitute. Dalton though wants the cure for other reasons then survival; he also wants it so that Vampires won’t have to feed on humans any more. Everything is normal in Dalton’s life until one night driving home he almost hits another vehicle. That vehicle was being driven by humans and after helping them avoid capture they get a sense that they can trust him. After arriving home, he is greeted by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman), who is there to help celebrate Edward’s birthday. Later that night, Edward gets another visitor, this time it is one of the humans he helped earlier that evening. Her name is Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and she has been looking for a vampire she can trust like Edward, so she hands him a note and a map and tells him to follow the instructions. So the next day, using his cars handy, daytime driving system, heads out to see what they want. He meets Lionel Cormac(William Dafoe), who likes to be called Elvis, he tells Edward that he has a cure that will make you human again. It turns out Lionel was a vampire once as well, but after an accident, he became human again. After escaping capture, Audrey and Lionel take Edward back to their hideout. Once there Edward tries and figures out how to duplicate what changed Lionel and even tries it on himself once he figures out how it happened. The story is different, which is something I like, I enjoyed the upside down world where vampires were the majority. The problem though is that it seems the Spierig brothers stopped being creative once they came up with the idea. Everything else seems copied from another film and the actors seem like they are there just for the pay check. This movie had a lot of promise, but the filmmakers just seemed like they didn’t know what to do with their great story idea. So just like most vampire movies these days, it’s better to stay at home then to waste your time going to see movies like this.

Brian Taylor