Daybreakers (2009)

Official trailer

Daybreakers gets its 7 on the strength of the best vampire world-building premise in years and loses points for not fully trusting it. The Spierig brothers imagined a near future where vampirism has won.

Most of humanity is now undead, society runs on blood the way ours runs on oil, and the few remaining humans are hunted and farmed for their blood. That’s now running out. It’s a smart science-fiction idea, and for its first hour the film is a sharp dystopian satire.

Then it remembers it’s also an action movie and the satire gives way to gunfire. The film is at its best when it’s just showing you how a vampire society would function, and at its weakest when it abandons that for a more conventional plot. There’s a great film in the world-building and a merely decent one in the story, and Daybreakers is both, in sequence.

The first hour of Daybreakers is a blast for me. Vampires fretting over a blood shortage like it’s a spike in gas prices is exactly the kind of idea I want from genre films, and the Spierigs commit to it all the way down to the commuter tunnels. Then the guns come out and I start guessing the next plot beat before it arrives.

The World Is the Star

The Spierigs thought through their premise with real rigor, and the pleasure of the first hour is watching the details. Vampires drink coffee with a splash of blood. Cars have blackout windows and external cameras for daytime driving. There are underground walkways so the undead can commute without sunlight. A subsidiary of a blood-supply corporation farms captured humans in vast facilities, draining them slowly. Children who were turned young will never grow up and roam in feral gangs.

The coffee with a splash of blood makes me laugh, and those feral children who’ll never grow up are the creepiest idea in the film. I’d have watched another half hour of nothing but this society going about its day.

This is world-building as the main attraction, and it works because every detail follows logically from the premise. The film asks what a civilization of vampires would build, and answers thoughtfully. The blood shortage drives everything. As human blood runs out, the deprived vampires degenerate into bat-like monsters called subsiders, so the society faces a resource crisis that’s also an existential one. The economy of blood is the film’s real subject, and it’s a good one.

Ethan Hawke and the Reluctant Vampire

Ethan Hawke plays Edward, a vampire hematologist working to synthesize a blood substitute, who sympathizes with the hunted humans and refuses to feed on them. Hawke gives the role more weight than the material strictly requires, playing Edward as a decent man sickened by his own society. He’s the audience’s way into the world, a vampire who hasn’t lost his humanity and is appalled by what his kind has built.

The casting around him is strong. Sam Neill plays the blood-corporation magnate as a smooth corporate villain who sees the shortage purely as a market problem. Willem Dafoe brings welcome energy as a human resistance fighter with a cure, chewing the scenery with evident pleasure. The cast is better than the back half of the film deserves, and they keep it watchable even when the plot turns generic.

Dafoe is the most fun I have in the second half. He knows exactly what kind of movie he’s in, and I’d have followed his character into a better one without complaint.

The Turn Toward Convention

The film’s second half is where it loses its way. The Spierigs build a strange world and raise an interesting crisis, then switch to a cure plot and a series of action sequences that could belong to any horror film. The blood-economy satire that made the first hour distinctive recedes, replaced by chases, shootouts, and a cure that arrives a little too conveniently.

This is the turn that costs the film points with me. I don’t mind a cure plot, but this one shows up right on schedule and sweeps aside everything interesting the first hour built.

The frustration is that the world was set up to support something more ambitious. The film raises real questions about resource scarcity, corporate control of necessities, and what a society does when the thing it runs on runs out. These are rich veins, and the film mostly drops them to deliver genre beats. The action is competently staged and the gore is plentiful, but it’s ordinary where the world-building was special, and the film never recaptures the sharpness of its first act.

Craft on a Budget

Made on a modest budget, the film looks more expensive than it was. The Spierigs and their team created a convincing near-future world of blue-gray corporate sterility, and the production design sells the vampire society effectively. The gore is enthusiastic and practical, with some startling effects, especially the degenerated subsiders and a few spectacular sun-exposure deaths.

The film is also paced well in its first half, doling out world-building details at a satisfying rhythm so the dystopia accumulates instead of dumps.

The Spierigs clearly cared most about the world they built, and that care shows in every frame of the setup. It’s only when the plot takes over that the seams appear, and even then the craft keeps it respectable. I’ll take a well-made film with a structural problem over a sloppy one any day.

Is Daybreakers worth watching?

Daybreakers gets its 7 on a smart premise and a richly built world, undercut by a second half that trades dystopian satire for conventional action. The vision of a vampire society facing a blood shortage is among the freshest ideas the genre has produced, the world-building is rigorous and convincing, and a strong cast led by Ethan Hawke gives it more weight than it needed. It loses points for abandoning its best material in favor of a generic cure plot and standard genre beats.

It’s a 7 because that first hour is good enough to carry a second hour that settles for competence. I wish the Spierigs had trusted their blood economy all the way to the end, and I’d still steer any genre fan toward it for the world alone.

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