Review of Daybreakers (2010) by Chads. — 09 Jan 2010

It's an all too obvious metaphor, the CEO of a billion dollar corporation as bloodsucking vampire, but that's exactly what Charles(Sam Neill) is, quite literally. The company he runs, Bromsley Marks, seems benevolent enough; this company, a major supplier of human blood, wants to solve the world's dwindling reserves by developing a blood substitute.

But just like any business, it's all about profits. The fact that human lives would be spared(the agenda which drives Edward(Ethan Hawke), a hematologist in charge of the program), becomes a secondary matter to the corporation, which shouldn't surprise this humanitarian(despite being a vampire himself), or anybody who knows how big business works.

"The Daybreakers", in spite of its silly storyline, does make a salient point about diseases and cures, or rather, the conflict of interest that may get in the way: best exemplified in the crucial scene where Charles admits to Edward about vampirism being good for business.

This rampant greed, so symptomatic in the corporate world, makes the moviegoer wonder about cancer, or AIDS, and what the drug companies would lose if such afflictions were remedied by some medical breakthrough.

The film itself alludes to vampirism as a disease when Charles talks about his daughter, who had characerized this condition of post-death dynamism as such, before she went underground with the other humans.

It's this same underground that Edward joins, a cell where he pioneers a conversion process requiring wine fermentation tanks, like something out of Ken Russell's "Altered States".

Predictably, "Daybreakers" gets bogged down by the requisite need for action. To allow such action to take place, the film invents an alternative way to transform back to human, which doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but is, admittedly, more cinematic than standing in line at a wine fermentation tank.