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A castrated vampire means incised incisors: DAYBREAKERS (2009)
Posted by Michael Thielvoldt
Dir. Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig
Alamo Drafthouse South Lamar, 1/15/10, 7:00pm
Polish your crucifix and sharpen your stakes! Vampires, vampires everywhere! That’s the premise for Daybreakers (2009), the latest fanged feature in a growing vampire film cycle popular the world over. The product of twin brothers writing/directing duo Michael and Peter Spierig, Daybreakers does a nice job of pumping new life (for lack of a better word) into a subgenre nearly drained of all novelty.
The world is overrun by vampires, and in an interesting inversion of the traditional vampire narrative humans have been relegated to the role of outsider. Blood is big business, and humans are hunted and harvested in Matrix-like blood farms, which are controlled by powerful corporations. But, when the human blood supplies dip to a threateningly low level, the civilized vampire population is faced with a horrifying fact: without human blood they will devolve into beastly man-bats, devoid of rationality and driven solely by an instinctual drive for blood that can never be quenched.
Hawke’s Dalton works tirelessly in his efforts to engineer faux-plasma
Enter Ethan Hawke as Edward Dalton, our hematologist vampire hero. The sympathetic Dalton works tirelessly at his attempts to engineer a blood substitute, efforts which time and time again fail as the world crumbs around him. A once civilized vampire society is falling into chaos as the less affluent citizens can no longer afford the skyrocketing costs of blood. The population is quickly succumbing to the mutative effects of malnourishment, and the affected individuals are carted off, locked up, and ultimately exterminated.
It is an interesting take on a very old genre. While not a perfect movie by any means, the Spierig brothers have admirably infused classic traditions with new blood. Like the vampires of old, these new corporate creatures have no reflection; they are destroyed by sunlight, vulnerable to wooden stakes, and reliant on human blood for sustenance. However, the Spierig twins have set them in a neoteric environment much different than the gothic stone fortresses associated with Dracula or even the rural backwaters populated by the Twilight gang. Vampires have learned to adapt. They have invented cars with shielded windows and high-tech camera systems for driving in the daylight. They order their blood from coffee stands selecting their preferred blood type like so many cinnamon spice mocha lattes.
While the film attempts rather clumsily to comment on various aspects of human society through the vampire mythos (economic and social hierarchies, greed, power, the fickleness of social civility, etc.), at its core the film is surprisingly entertaining. It is an action movie with some restraint, although I use the qualifier rather loosely.
A few moments had me scratching my head, while others drove me to outright laughter (and not really in good way). In one such moment a large SUV packed with vampires and engaged in a car chase flies off one end of a broken bridge and crashes into the other side. The far end of the bridge pierces the SUV and presumably its vampire passengers. Pause for suspense, and the vehicle explodes and drops from the bridge. Nothing up to this point has suggested that piercing a vampire results in a fiery explosion, an explosion of blood, yes, but where did the fire come from? And it surely was not from the SUV, as the bridge pierced the windshield and interior of vehicle certainly not the gas tank (if that was their logic). I am convinced that it was nothing more than sloppy action movie making, a tired cliché, with no logical grounding. This trend continues later in the film when, in what could only be an homage to Zack Snyder, a vampires feeding frenzy is captured in super slow-motion. Excessive blood splatter, dismembered limbs. It’s like 300, but with VAMPIRES!
Neill’s button-down baddie, Charles Bromley
In spite of all of these tired techniques, I still enjoyed the film. Sam Neill works surprisingly well into his role as the bloated, capitalistic blood farmer Charles Bromley. His pudgy physique packs fittingly into Bromley’s three-piece suits and his feint Irish accent passes through inch-long fangs with a kind of eerie naturalness. To put it plainly, it suits him. And, more than that, he brings something to the role that I don’t often associate with a typical Neill performance: depth. He is not the power-hungry caricatured villain found in James Cameron’s Avatar, but a more layered antagonist that, while still evil, complicates his image with the affection he caries for his long-lost human daughter. His malevolence stems from greed and ambition, yes, but it is always underwritten by fear and sadness.
This is actually a good example of Daybreakers’s vampires. They are not the all-powerful, ever-seducing Dracula, nor are they Twilight’s teen heartthrobs. Instead, they are desperate, panicked, and—at times—even feeble. They appear to have no real powers, other than immortality. No flight, no acknowledged superior strength or agility. They just live for a really, really long time.
Subsiders, a mug only a mother could love
However, a more traditional vampire monster emerges to counter this inferior incarnation. The second type, known as “subsiders” because they have been forced into subterranean existences by their surface dwelling former selves, are the distorted remains of starving vampires. Along with the horrid physical changes previously described, subsiders subsequently increase their strength. A lone subsider easily throws Edward and his brother across a room as if they were nothing more than ragdolls. Additionally, they appear to defy gravity. On more than one occasion the camera pedestals up or down through the city’s layers of streets and sublevels capturing what appears to be inverted subsider fight clubs. They screech and hiss, feast without restraint. They are very much the id incarnate, and a monster worthy of our fear.
For someone who has spent a great deal of time engulfed in vampire mythology, I have found something of worth in this latest installment to the canon. So, for those who can stomach the occasional bloody bout, Daybreakers is definitely worth your while.
