Reviews rated at 4 glooms
If this is the way to break it, I don't want it fixed.
Daybreakers
directed by
Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig
posted by Kazallo
With a surge of vampire films hitting the screens these days DayBreakers manages to actually create something fresh within it. In a world where vampires have taken over and hunt what's left of humans to keep the blood flowing into the daily vampire's coffee cup, a story emerges that stakes on the choice between immortally or humanity.
The atmosphere of the world depicted in this film brings up so many more questions than just the hunt for blood. In a society of immortals how does one move up in the world? No one ever has to retire from old age. No one dies to free up housing space. Have children stop being born as more and more humans are drained into nothingness? Would the planet stagnate into a congealed mass of commonness? How long would one have to work a 9 to 5 gig before they could retire? 800 years? 10,000 years? None of this is particularly covered in the film, but I couldn't help but wonder what the long term idea was.
This film also stays close to an old vampire hunter movie and tosses in a couple of crossbow shots to the heart with quite an awesome result. The effects of this film were fantastic and the bloodiness seemed just right. Not too much, not too little. That being said there was a plenty of it! And then some!
<<< ALERT! >>> Spoilers Ahead! <<< ALERT! >>>
At first glance the main character seemed to good to be true. He was too humble, too principled. He drank some sort of pig blood to avoid having to drink human blood. He never wanted to be a vampire and fought to create a blood substitute that would remove the need for vampires to have to hurt innocent people. He was all around the moral hero times two. The reason it works for this film is because society's views have degraded so far that putting humans into coma like states to drain them is totally fine. They use the military to hunt them down like animals to be caged. If he wasn't of impeccable character to start with society would have got to him by now.
The meeting at high noon I found to be extremely funny and clever. It situated the tree shade straight down, and because basically the world was reversed on day/night cycle it was the equivalent to meeting at midnight in any other film to have their secret meeting. I love seeing something as reused as that with a fresh coat of paint.
The side story between the father and daughter seemed pointless to me at first until I realized it was actually what the film was really trying to say the most. If he had died of cancer years before he would have had a decent life with his daughter and retained his humanity. By becoming a vampire and attempting to alter his fate his "life" went on, but why? He lost his daughter over it only to regain her later and watch her turn into a monster that had to be destroyed. He did it out of love, so he said, but really it was out of selfishness and fear of death. I think the writers here were really trying to harp on the fact that it's not the quantity of life you live, but the quality of that life.
The end scene with the soldiers tossing bodies around, and as one turned into a human they'd be devoured by the next and so on and so and so on was fantastic. It truly expressed grizzly bloody insatiability. I wouldn't' be surprised if the writers thought of that scene first and then built a movie around how to make that happen.
NWOD Inspiration
The creatures they transformed into from lack of blood could easily be some sort of vampire epidemic. Either blood deprivation or perhaps just a disease that some humans carried that turned vampires that fed on them into mindless killing machines. A mage could have created it with life magic and takes pleasure in vampires being forced to kill their vampire friends to the secrecy of their kind.
The facility that housed the humans that were being drained could be a real company that fronts as whatever but serves as a blood bank for vampires. In fact that exact company could be plopped into a game. The boss could still be a vampire, but some of the staff might need to be actual humans, or ghouls.
The daylight driving setup would be very useful for vampire players trying to get around during daylight. It'd need to have some sort of external monitor displaying people in the car or it'd be pulled over in about five seconds by a cop.
The suits they had to get around during daylight were also pretty cool.
