Join the 'Daybreakers' Cult… While You Can
Just when you thought there wasn't any more room for vampires
We all have our personal little movie gems, those mostly forgotten films you love to pass on to your friends, hoping they'll dig them too. Those movies you love to love and love even more knowing that not everyone loves them or even heard of them, much less heard of cool people like you loving them. Well, here's your chance to be on the ground floor of a future cult classic and avoid ending up as the one who discovers a film four years after the fact only to pretend you were pimping it from day one.
Go see Daybreakers. Soon. It opened at the box-office with a decent $15 million and one week later it's no longer in the top ten. So, it'll vanish from your friendly neighborhood movie theater real quick-like, if it hasn't already. A real shame. It's the best movie I've seen this year. Okay, it's the only movie I've seen this year so far. But whose counting anyways?
It's good. Not brilliant. Not a masterpiece. It's simply good, which actually makes it more endearing. You can accept the flaws and revel in the good stuff.
The Spierig Brothers took the ancient zombies-have-inherited-the-Earth premise and swapped out the brain-eating walking dead with the blood-sucking walking dead, which remarkably feels like an original idea. But I may be mistaken. The idea seems so DUH that someone had to have done it before. Right? Maybe not. I digress.
It's 2019. Humans are nearly extinct. Vampires own the world. But really, life isn't too much different except everyone works the night shift and prefers blood in their coffee rather than creamer. Yet, since vampires have turned just about everybody into sun-hating fang mouths, blood is running out. As fate would have it, when vamps go on a bloodless diet they morph into that dude from Robocop who takes a bath in toxic waste, only with wings and claws and worse breath I presume.
Ethan Hawke plays a self-loathing vampire hematologist searching for a blood substitute. Sam Neill is his evil corporate boss. Willem Dafoe rounds out the big names in the cast as a human-turned-vampire-turned-back-to-human vampire killing Jesus figure… named Elvis (I want a "Team Elvis" t-shirt if anyone is inclined to create one… Mondo?).
Dafoe and Hawke team up to cure vampirism and corporate greed and all that bullshit. Nothing new there. Yet, the film works on an allegorical level about the depletion of natural resources and how that'll eventually force the collapse of law and order and personal hygiene. It's like Avatar with vampires instead of blue aliens. Okay not exactly, but they both roll out a similar tree-hugging message.
The film's premise is interesting. The plot doesn't break brain vessels by insulting your intelligence. And it's no surprise that a fine cast of actors turn in solid performances. That's a great foundation. The Spierig Brothers build upon it by delivering some nifty action beats exploding with ludicrous squibs all wrapped up in atmospheric visuals that never feel overtly derivative.
It's a slick film. And between its genre, superb execution and the all-around cool factor it exhibits, Daybreakers has the makings to find its footing on home video. Fantastic. As long as it finds an audience someday, I'm happy. Yet, if you get a chance now, see Daybreakers in the theater. Tell your friends. Let the cult join you this time around.
NOTE: "The Goods" is a new regular mini-column focusing on, well, good stuff, whether it be nifty news, or finding the sunshine in otherwise bad things, or just pointing out something really cool like an interesting movie poster, little seen film, or viral video. This is a column attempting to add a slight bit of counter-balance to the boring sourness the Internet radiates. That's not saying this column discourages robust debate on its topics. In fact, just the opposite. If you disagree with anything, say so. We just hope you do it in a civil, thoughtful manner.
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I agree. Very well-made film, especially the first half, which I dug the hell out of.
My husband and I both had a ton of fun at Daybreakers. It didn't hurt that I had very low expectations going in – horror movies in January don't have a track record for being great for me. We liked the story, we liked the multiple layers of social commentary, and we liked Elvis, too.
I loved this movie. I'm really disappointed that it isn't doing better at the box-office. I've been trying to recommend it to everyone I know, but apparently it hasn't helped much. There is only so much one man can do… unless you are Ethan Hawke or Willem Dafoe.
To Brad,
I am curious to see your review for Daybreakers actually
@David Frank: I couldn't disagree more. While it was a truly original story (well, I Am Legend was the first graphic novel to imagine a world in which everyone has turned into vampires – but they were more like monsters), and while I did enjoy it to the half-way mark, the second half of the film descended into used cliches, cheesy dialogue and action sequences, all to be followed by the inevitable "happy" ending.
By the end of the film, I couldn't care less what happened to these characters or if the world would actually become "normal" again. This is one of the more forgettable films I've ever seen.
I once saw an Outer Limits episode (I think), where world war III caused a nuclear winter with ash and soot blocking out the sun. The result was tha
…that vanpires took over.
@mfan:
I guess now that I remember the novel for I Am Legend deals w/ vampires taking over the world. Whoops. I knew I was forgetting something.
I saw this film and i loved it. It's definately the best vampire film ever! (with the exception of Dracula)
I disagree. I think the film starts off on the right foot (its setting and style reminded me of the underrated "Blade") before it devolves into a campy, excessively gory stew of vampire hokum.
There's a wide-angle slow-motion shot late in the film (which I'm not spoiling by the way, it's in the trailer) of soldiers participating in mass jugular evisceration that's so ridiculous you can't help but laugh at it. In the end, any questions of humanity vs. immortality are reduced to a cheap thrill – the result is a "B" movie in every way.
And why does Ethan Hawke's character have a cutlery set in his kitchen?
I saw it last night and I am utterly impressed.
I think it will turn into a cult movie, the way Donnie Darko did.
The film was quite bad actually and no, it wontl turn into a new Donnie Darko. Mostly it was not very fun to watch Sam Neill and Willem Dafoe trying to work with the god damn unimaginative dialogue they were given.
And it wasn't really very gorey. It was filled with some computer-generated stuff, that could've looked like blood after some more effort from the digital effects department, but now mostly looked like something you can't really think of as blood even if you really put your mind to it and try.
And when the characters joked, it was mostly embarrassing. It had a cool premise, though ripped off from a Buffy episode, which did it better and in named tv-series they also had vampires who probably would have been smart enough to build up farms to reproduce enough humans to avoid the problem encountered by the much less intelligent vampires in this film. It really did have moments and in the beginning it was even creepy at times.