Hey! Now that's weird.. I actually like a movie with Ethan Hawke in it.... Weird
Daybreakers takes place in a world where vampires has taken over the population. And for the most part, they have become civilized. They have formed a civil society, these vampires have homes, they have cars, they have jobs, the only thing different is that they rely on human blood to live. But as the human population begin to dwindle, the vampires have no choice but to hunt the remaining humans and farm them for their blood. In comes Ethan Hawkes character who is working on creating a blood substitute to ensure the survival of the vampires and the human race.
Now I'm watching this film and I gotta tell you, this has got to be the most original vampire film I have seen since Dead and Loving It. Daybreakers brings the mythology of vampire films to the next level with the experimentation of what the world will be like if vampires really did take over. And the things they do around here to portray the vampire dominant world is so genius, I want to make out with the screenwriter of this movie.
The guys who directed this are the Spierig brothers and they did this with an incredibly small budget. But my God did they blew this out of the park. Daybreakers looks like a $100 million film, easy. The art direction in the movie can match that of Minority Report's and every little detail, even the obscure ones were so original it blew my mind to heaven.
We have emo vampire children committing suicide just by exposing themselves to sunlight, the vampires have their own blood version of Starbucks, African blood Cappuccino and everything, we have special built cars for daylight driving, every little detail about how a vampire world would be like was really well thought out to the point that it blows me away and scares me the same time.
Ethan Hawke was really great playing Ethan Hawke in this. Can he do anything else but be himself in every single movie he's in? The best performance in this was Willem Defoe, who I strongly suspect is a vampire cause that guy looks exactly the same way he did in Platoon in the 1980's, that guy never ages man.
But with all the things I love about Daybreakers, I just wished that the story would have been thought out a little bit more. This movie is only 1 hour 15 minutes long and I can tell you that there are at least 20 minutes worth of scenes here that were irrelevant to the story.
One being the whole side story with Isabel Lucas. Now this girl is fine as hell, I've said it since I saw her in Revenge of the Fallen and she is a decent actress. Only her character had absolutely no reason for being in this movie. She had no interaction with any of the main characters, none of them even knew she existed. Her story kind of comes up like an intermission between the second act and the third act which left me going, "Wha?"
But she's still fine as hell.
And I was really disappointed that the movie ended in a rather shitty way. I mean they start off with a really big bang. They have one of the most original ideas since sliced bread, they build up great conflict and tension in the first two acts and everything collapsed in the third. I felt like I was watching two different movies. Or watching The Matrix and The Matrix Revolutions back to back. Great beginning, lousy ending.
I can honestly say it was such a letdown walking out of the cinema because I believed that Daybreakers had the potential of becoming the next District 9. But I still loved the hell out of this movie for it's originality. Hopefully, in a few years time they will consider remaking this again and give it a bigger budget and another look at the script because this is an idea too good to waste.
RATING: 6/10
