Chris Knipp Writing: Movies, Politics, Art


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PostPosted: Tue Jan 12, 2010 3:02 pm 
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Vampire society: a moody, hipster world of declining blood supply and noirish chicness

B-horror romp for A-Listers

Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe have fun playing in this high-concept vampire movie made down under by the German-born Spierig brothers, which has a snazzy darkness about it but unfortunately takes its analogies about resources to a mindlessly violent finale that resolves nothing. Still if this is junk, it's good junk, a better than average B-horror movie with A-Listers in the leads. It's violent and pretty gory, but tongue-in-cheek hipsters will enjoy its mixture of splatter and concept.

This time it's a decade in the future, a future that's better off being dark, since most of the earth's population has been turned by some global virus into. . .vampires! The trouble is there are too few mortals around any more to provide that human blood the undead always need, and those few are on the run being chased by a vampire army. Bromsley Marks, a giant corporation that has cornered the supply, has comatose bodies dwindling in their showcase warehouse. While news stories chant of rioting and the search for a cure for vampirism, Bromley wants to maintain the status quo, but develop a synthetic substitute for human blood that they alone will sell.

With its hip stars and its darkly chic mise-en-scene, this movie isn't a junk movie. Its high concept is not a patch on more profound sci-fi punditry like Children of Men, but having the planet (i.e., US) turned undead is genuinely novel, and the theatrically effective chases and shoot-outs and cork-like head explosions combine with some good lines to promise mild cult status. Moreover for hard core folks Daybreakers is a lovely antidote to the suburban Cosmo silliness that is the Twilight franchise.

Meanwhile it's all about the look and the style: the vampires live by night, naturally, with underground walkways and fat cat Chryslers with black windows and navigation equipment to allow driving blind when the light comes up. Everything looks like the Budapest subway world of Nimród Antal's movie Kontroll, except with zap guns out of District 9 and clothes and makeup that are a liitle bit Forties, retro.

Into this scene comes Ethan Hawke, as Edward Dalton, the corporation's chief hemotologist, a progressive type who "turned" rather unwillingly. Sallow and a bit scruffy, but in a dressy suit and tie, he looks like the writer William S. Burroughs with better cheekbones, or J. Robert Oppenheimer (another doom factory employee with a conscience) with a little more flesh on him.

Dalton has a built-in conflict: his younger brother Frankie (Michael Dorman) who's a gung-ho military human trapper. Frankie won't have things changed. "I was never any good at being human," he says; he's good at running around gobbling blood. Bromley, Edward's boss (Sam Neill, another prestigious actor), is interested only in exploiting the situation for profit. The blood substitute will make him richer, but there will always be rich connoisseurs willing to pay for the real thing; blood is already being bottled as if it was Chateau Lafite, and he'll sell that too. But Bromley has his own troubling pull: his daughter, who has refused to "turn," and remains human, free of those little teeth and blank cat-like eyes (makeup for this movie involved hundreds of sets of these).

Along comes the human underground, which Edward Dalton encounters subtly by running into one of their vans. He shields a few of them from being rounded up by police, and meets cute Audrey (Claudia Karvan), who leads him to their leader, Lionel, code name Elvis (Willem Dafoe), a gnarly down-home jokeste ("We're the folks with the cross-bows") who's discovered a rough but effective way to change a vampire back to a human.

The message is simple: we can't go on living like this, sucking the blood of. . .the earth. The general vampire population realizes that being a vampire, immortality not withstanding, won't work, not for the entire population (the Cullens were the minority at their high school, remember?). Fast food joints are offering their drinks with a dwindling percentage of blood in them, and the undead pupulation is getting nasty -- but not as nasty as those vampires whose long utter deprivation of red corpuscles turns them into downsiders, morphed by prolonged blood starvation into wretched violent creatures that look like giant, angry, decrepit bats.

Daybreakers, you see, alternates between being pretty cool and dark, and being ultra-violent. An army volunteer is tested with a vaccine and explodes with a suddenness that will make you jump out of your seat as blood and flesh bang and pop and splatter all over the scene; something similar happens in Dalton's large, sepulchral apartment when a downsider sneaks in. Heads are popping off right and left like giant gory corks. Tableaux of vampires declined into monstrous creaturehood are awesome to see, but like Avatar, the film declines gradually into a stepped-up action showdown that throws away the originality and coolness.

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