Review of Daybreakers (2010) by Jon P — 01 Mar 2011

When I saw the trailer for Daybreakers I thought: Ethan Hawke in a vampire movie, it looks pretty good, but I bet it'll be terrible! Actually it wasn't that terrible. The story was solid fantasy, so I knew not to take it TOO seriously.

At a glimpse, a plague has transformed most of the world into vampires and a pharmaceutical company is harvesting blood from the last poached humans left on earth in a high tech, sci-fi meat farm; and we all know what corrupt assholes the pharm people are. What's the incentive in finding a cure, when the profit's in the panacea? This message is a controversial one, and will be for a while.

Back when I used to work in the neuroscience field, the same thing was happening: as scientists found cures for depression and ADHD, the pharmaceutical companies were blocking funding left and right.

Think about it: if we neutralized most of our diseases, the planet would proliferate too vastly, placebos would lose their hold in physical and mental monopolies, the economic hierarchy would topple, and the long sought after fountain of youth would become yesterday's muse--if one possessed the immortality of a vampire.

But what would happen if all the delicious human blood ran dry? If our natural resources ran dry? Demand outweighed supply and we became forced to cannibalize our own to survive? De-evolution perhaps? The same as if we were to breed too close to home. And so it happens in the film, where vampires who nourish themselves upon other vampires become feral with blood lust and scourge upon dystopian society like vagrant rats.

How did I get all this out of a silly Blockbuster vampire movie? The answer is: Daybreakers is clever in that it has the capacity to reach a million demographics at once.

Take one dose high production value, dumb it down with gory distractions, add a few smart actors, and a couple of exploding gut buckets with teeth, and what we have is a pretty solid product.