Daybreakers: The end of an un-natural obsession
As a species, human is obsessed about death. The end of living (at least in our physical world), thus mythologies from many cultures spoke of the band of undead in various shape or form. And of those, the one that receive the most cultural coverage probably was vampirism. Not only are there many literature about this mythical race in endless combination of genres and settings. The most popular one, at least recently? The Twilight saga, both the books and the movies attracted a rabid fan base known as "Twihard". However, vampirism is much more prevalent in our culture than a teenage girl's obsession, even geeks spoke of vampires fondly, from the Blade series to 30 Days of Night to the latest, The Daybreakers. All of which had migrated from their comic book roots to appeal to a wider audience via film adaptation.
So what makes Daybreakers special? Not much, on a certain level, it was not unlike Blade - a vampire who looks to help humans, yet instead of wielding mighty weapon of violence, Ed, the protagonist of Daybreakers, is a scientist, a hematologist at that. How much more geeky can it get? A vampire who refuses to drink human blood and research on the development of blood substitutes.
Or better yet, one who will eventually return to the (very thin) rank of humans. Throw in familial tension/dispute, an unlikely cure, and a few betrayals to boot, and you got the ever-twisting-and-turning story that is Daybreaker. For some strange reason, the essence of the story reminded me of AeonFlux, or perhaps I was seeing things...
But, like AeonFlux, it isn't all sunshine and flowers for this film. To start, most of the contextual imagery were so corny you'd wonder if they were meant to be ironical, a satire to other corny vampire films, or if the director just ran out of fresh ideas and thought it is a good idea to make references to bad films. What might have worked in the windows of a comic book certainly did not translate well onto film - which be the director's failing.
All the actors were quite animated in this film, though the characters themselves might use some development to avoid appearing to be flat and archtype (and the daughter storyline? One of the most head-scratching, lame sub-plot in vampire film history, right up there with Bella doing retarded things). Each character seem to represent a certain trait that is difficult to lend proper dimensions to the character. In short: lame characterizations.
And the editor, again, need to be scolded for their non-effort on the last gory sequence in the film - the cuts were choppy, which can be excused for the sake of creating tension, but really, no audience need to see that particularly pointless gory sequence in all its 15-minutes gory, I mean glory. A 5-minutes sequence would have drive home the point, if properly edited, and save us a few yawns and the feeling of ridiculousness.
Unless of course, this whole film is a parody of the vampire film genre, then we may have a masterpiece on our hands yet.
So what makes Daybreakers special? Not much, on a certain level, it was not unlike Blade - a vampire who looks to help humans, yet instead of wielding mighty weapon of violence, Ed, the protagonist of Daybreakers, is a scientist, a hematologist at that. How much more geeky can it get? A vampire who refuses to drink human blood and research on the development of blood substitutes.
Or better yet, one who will eventually return to the (very thin) rank of humans. Throw in familial tension/dispute, an unlikely cure, and a few betrayals to boot, and you got the ever-twisting-and-turning story that is Daybreaker. For some strange reason, the essence of the story reminded me of AeonFlux, or perhaps I was seeing things...
But, like AeonFlux, it isn't all sunshine and flowers for this film. To start, most of the contextual imagery were so corny you'd wonder if they were meant to be ironical, a satire to other corny vampire films, or if the director just ran out of fresh ideas and thought it is a good idea to make references to bad films. What might have worked in the windows of a comic book certainly did not translate well onto film - which be the director's failing.
All the actors were quite animated in this film, though the characters themselves might use some development to avoid appearing to be flat and archtype (and the daughter storyline? One of the most head-scratching, lame sub-plot in vampire film history, right up there with Bella doing retarded things). Each character seem to represent a certain trait that is difficult to lend proper dimensions to the character. In short: lame characterizations.
And the editor, again, need to be scolded for their non-effort on the last gory sequence in the film - the cuts were choppy, which can be excused for the sake of creating tension, but really, no audience need to see that particularly pointless gory sequence in all its 15-minutes gory, I mean glory. A 5-minutes sequence would have drive home the point, if properly edited, and save us a few yawns and the feeling of ridiculousness.
Unless of course, this whole film is a parody of the vampire film genre, then we may have a masterpiece on our hands yet.