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juushikaWent and saw it for the boy's brother's birthday the other day, so a quick review: If you fell in love with the trailer as much as I did, Daybreakers may disappoint you because the film trades atmosphere for violence. The trailer promises decay, darkness, and sadness, a sense of claustrophobia and of impending loss. The film delivers all of that, but in scraps and pieces. What it delivers in droves is violence, extravagant and bloody, at one point devolving into a slow-motion feeding frenzy featuring fountains of gushing arterial blood. There's plenty of room for violence in a vampire film, but Daybreakers glories in gore to the point of being funny—there were a lot of laughs running through the audience in the showing I saw. There's a place for that, too (and I love campy vampire movies as much as the next person) but in Daybreakers it breaks the tension and overshadows the atmosphere.
The movie underneath these aspects is largely competent but uninspired. A premise of a vampire majority is a nice twist and it keeps things fresh; the plot is unremarkable, and the film's eventual antagonist so predictable and exaggerated as to be disappointing. There are a few too many cheap scares, but they're balanced by a handful of more artful moments: my favorites were glimpses of vampires living as unaging children* and one young woman's violent and personal struggle against the vampires. Ethan Hawke is enjoyable enough as the lead, but Willem Dafoe is the real gem, campy and clever and tough.
So go into the film with lower expectations than the trailer would have you believe, I guess, and it's not bad: a gory, sparkle-free but unfortunately low-tension vampire film with a clever setting, some good moments, and limited outright disappointments. But oh, how I wish it had been more like the trailer, more atmospheric, quieter, more claustrophobic, more hopeless. That could have been a great film; the one I saw was only okay.
* In line with things that could have been great: I would love to see media about child vampires. Not in the Vampire Chronicle's Claudia sense, where she requires Louis to protect her and is largely shunned by her own kind. Instead, in the Daybreakers's sense, where society protects vampires and so children vampires are largely self-sufficient, despite their physical fragility. In Daybreakers there's a clip of a group of them, dressed as adults, sitting together, smoking—and it's a great image. The cognitive dissonance of childlike bodies and adult behaviors catches the eye and imagination. I think there's a lot there worth exploring: how and why they self-segregate, what sort of new subculture they form, how they cope with the remaining physical difficulties created by their bodies (and perhaps brains?), if there are any.
The movie underneath these aspects is largely competent but uninspired. A premise of a vampire majority is a nice twist and it keeps things fresh; the plot is unremarkable, and the film's eventual antagonist so predictable and exaggerated as to be disappointing. There are a few too many cheap scares, but they're balanced by a handful of more artful moments: my favorites were glimpses of vampires living as unaging children* and one young woman's violent and personal struggle against the vampires. Ethan Hawke is enjoyable enough as the lead, but Willem Dafoe is the real gem, campy and clever and tough.
So go into the film with lower expectations than the trailer would have you believe, I guess, and it's not bad: a gory, sparkle-free but unfortunately low-tension vampire film with a clever setting, some good moments, and limited outright disappointments. But oh, how I wish it had been more like the trailer, more atmospheric, quieter, more claustrophobic, more hopeless. That could have been a great film; the one I saw was only okay.
* In line with things that could have been great: I would love to see media about child vampires. Not in the Vampire Chronicle's Claudia sense, where she requires Louis to protect her and is largely shunned by her own kind. Instead, in the Daybreakers's sense, where society protects vampires and so children vampires are largely self-sufficient, despite their physical fragility. In Daybreakers there's a clip of a group of them, dressed as adults, sitting together, smoking—and it's a great image. The cognitive dissonance of childlike bodies and adult behaviors catches the eye and imagination. I think there's a lot there worth exploring: how and why they self-segregate, what sort of new subculture they form, how they cope with the remaining physical difficulties created by their bodies (and perhaps brains?), if there are any.
