A Movie Review: Daybreakers

"Daybreakers." I enjoyed this movie; gory, bloody, vampires are evil type of movie.

SPOILERS!!!

The main plot points is an attempt to find a blood substitute that vampires can use. The main reason is that there isn't a large enough human slave population to support the majority vampire population. See, vampires can't just kill humans for their blood. They must keep them alive and bleed them. There are so many vampires that humans are near extinction and therefore you have a supply problem. If vampires don't get their necessary blood intake, they transform into ugly, unrecognizable creatures. This results in the need for a human blood substitute. This is where Edward (Ethan Hawke)comes into play. He's a vampire hematologist trying to find a cure, not just a blood substitute.

One night, Edward runs into some humans. He helps them avoid the police. They in turn come to him for support in their effort -- which is to find a cure for turning vampires back into humans. In this group of humans is a former vampire that turned back into a human, Elvis (Willem Dafoe). This transformation was by accident when Elvis was driving during the daytime, got into an accident, and got tossed from his car in full daylight. Luckily, he landed into some water. The light; however, somehow got his heart beating again. Edward re-enacts this in an experiment. It works, but it is a painful process.

Obviously, there has to be a less painful way to transform vampires back into humans. Here's where I liked the movie. Instead of finding a cure within two hours by going through an amazingly quick paced scientific process, the solution is instead found via accident. I think often times this is how progress is made, via chance. The cure found is that the blood of a vampire-turned-human individual transforms a vampire. This finding both leads to a potential cure, but also to a 28 Days Later in reverse scenario. With the vampire population nearing starvation, the vampire army pounces on the handful of vampire turned human individuals. Blood and gore for about ten minutes.

The one thing I enjoyed about this movie is the fact that the plot doesn't have massive holes in it -- my opinion, of course. Some movies (like last summer's Transformers) have plot holes that you can drive a truck through. Admittedly, there are some holes such as when Edward walks into Bromsley Marks Corp as a human and isn't fed upon by the vampires though a few minutes later in the movie military men feed hungrily on Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), CEO of Bromsley Marks Corp, who is unknowingly given the cure. The explanation could be that Edward is met by more discipline employees of the company while others are met by less disciplined, more aggressive military personnel.