Daybreakers – It’s a vampire’s world

Article first published as Movie Review: Daybreakers – It’s A Vampire’s World on Blogcritics.

Most vampire movies try to find a new approach to the subject, with varying results. Some keep to the old traditional view of the vampire as a supernatural monster and some incorporate more modern medical theory. Daybreakers falls in the second category. Sort of.

In a not too distant future a pandemic has hit the planet, turning most regular citizens into vampires. You still get infected through blood and biting, but the vampiric condition has become the norm rather than the exception. This means blood is rapidly becoming a commodity that is in short supply. Some humans are kept like cattle in large facilities and their blood is ”harvested”. It’s all done reasonably humanely, the humans aren’t awake for any of this.

Scientists are working on a blood substitute that is supposed to help with the supply and demand problems. The main blood supplier is the Bromley Marks company run by Charles Bromley (Sam Neill). Our main protagonist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a haematologist hard at work on the task of finding a cure. He is also a reluctant vampire, having been turned by his brother Frankie (Michael Dorman). Frankie works as a human hunter, trying to round up any strays that may still be running around in the daytime.

There are some humans fighting the disease, trying to stay ahead of what is rapidly becoming the rule. These are led by Audrey (Claudia Karvan) and Elvis (Willem Dafoe). Elvis has managed to cure himself from vampirism through an extraordinary set of circumstance that involve a car crash, sunlight and water.

The vampires are starving, which is why the clock is ticking for Edward to find a cure’ as well as for the whole vampire population in terms of survival. If they feed on other vampires, on themselves or on animal blood for too long they turn into a more primal, bat-like creature with a much higher level of aggression. They lose any remnants of humanity through the starvation process and are therefore summarily executed by the government.

There are things about this movie that are really appealing, like the way the world has adapted to night time living and what kind of technological solutions have been worked out to allow the vampires to go about their business during the day. The heavy noir feeling you get from the grey monochromatic life of false daylight and night time life is contrasted by a richly suffused palette for the daytime scenes, which makes it easier to understand why Edward fights his vampire condition so hard.

Evil here is represented by Sam Neill’s character, the large corporation incorporate. He just wants to make money, same as always, and weather he does that by exploiting the last remaining humans or not makes no difference to him. Finding a substitute, or a cure, is never really on his agenda.

There are all kinds of family drama going on as well, Charles’ human daughter Alison (Isabel Lucas) refuses to let herself be turned, and once it’s done forcibly she feeds on herself rather than accepting her ration of blood, which quickly turns her into a monster. Edward and his brother have all kinds of issues to work out, concerning the nature of humanity and which is better – vampire or humankind.

There is however a crux. It may be stylish, and pretty and have aspirations of making comments about society and humanity and inter-human relationships, and it’s even got Willem Defoe and Sam Neill, but it still isn’t a very good movie, even in its genre. It tries to do too much, it works too hard at being cool. It delivers broody shots of Edward’s struggle to remain human one moment and explodes a vampire body in an orgy of blood and splatter the next.

The cure for the vampire disease turns out to be the blood of a vampire who has been turned back into a human. This results in what can best be described as a messy bloodbath at the very end of the movie when starving vampires fall on the re-humanized vampires and tear them apart, only to be turned back themselves and so on and so forth. The disease eats the cure eats the disease and maybe the cure will be pandemic as well, but at a very high price.

I have a thing about vampire movies and could easily draw out all the implications of using blood disease and sickness as a metaphor or a synecdoche, but I never really get involved enough in this particular telling of an old familiar story to think it worth the bother. For all its gore this is a bland and anaemic specimen of the genre. Sadly.

Written and directed by Michael Spierig & Peter Spierig, starring Ethan Hawke (Edward Dalton), Willem Dafofe (Lionel ‘Elvis’ Cormac), Sam Neill (Charles Bromley), Claudia Karvan (Audrey Bennett), Michael Dorman (Frankie Dalton), Isabel Lucas (Alison Bromley), Vince Colosimo (Christopher Caruso).

The Good German – Modern Noir

Steven Soderberg’s The Good German (2006) stars George Clooney, Tobey Maguire and Cate Blanchett amongst others. It is set in bombed out Berlin in 1945 and has that stylish 1945 aesthetic – black-and-white, ruins and costumes that can make any one look absolutely gorgeous. Jake Geismer (Clooney) arrives to report on the peace conference and try to locate an old acquaintance Lena Brandt (Blanchett). Geismer’s assigned a driver Tully (Maguire), who just happens to be involved with Lena.

The set-up and the plot are quite frankly old school traditional Film Noir. It does a really good job of it, too. Everyone has their own agenda. There’s the treacherous woman (Blanchett) who has collaborated with whoever can help her out of dire situation involving her husband. There’s the young cad, Tully, played surprisingly well by Maguire, who sees the whole situation as an excellent way to get rich quick taking advantage of the lawlessness of post-war Berlin, and Geismer (Clooney) who stumbles into the middle of the convoluted situation with political, personal and social implications. We’ve got Americans and Russians and Germans trying to work out what’s what and track down any Nazi criminals and collaborators still hanging around. We’ve got the classical Noir love story where the girl is not as innocent as she might seem. Lena does whatever she has to which comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with the genre.

You can’t not like it. It’s stylish and plot-twisty and impressive. You have to excuse the crappy fake-German accents and the somewhat stylized performances, because they are as true to the genre as the music. Let me just say that the music composed by Thomas Newman is so bang on the money that it makes you believe someone actually dug this role of film up from a 1945 vault somewhere. Except for the swearing. And the nudity. And the violence.

We are after all a modern audience and wouldn’t have it any other way… The decorum has changed since the days of the Maltese Falcon after all.

You do, however, need the same kind of understanding that you would bring to an honest-to-goodness 1940something black-and-white movie, or you really won’t appreciate this effort. And it has that “hero can get up and pick a fight after having been knocked unconscious twice and drunk a half bottle of scotch” aspect. The actors and actresses picked for the leads are those that could easily translate into the Hollywood star system of the 1940s, both in regards to status and looks.

One thing you should not ask yourself, though, is why. Why make a replica of a genre that has been done already, and done better with more legitimacy? Why make Blanchett come across as a cheap Marlene Dietrich copy, or try and seduce us with all Hollywood sets and period lenses? It seems indulgent to say the least. As long as you don’t ask those questions you’ll be fine.

Part of the glamour of the period is that it is unattainable in a high-tech post-modern world. Our position can only ever be ironic and distant, no matter how much homage we cram into the context. Part of the love affair we have with this glamour of the past is that it has a certain naiveté that has been irrevocably lost. That’s why I feel L.A. Confidential is a better Noirish tale. It remains true to the ideal, but deals with it from a less sentimental standpoint.

Mule