Word: blood
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...turned 90% of the world into vampires. The upside: immortality. Then again, with the vast majority of the population now bloodsuckers, there's a significant shortage of bloodsuckees: the few remaining humans, most of whom are imprisoned and "farmed" in a vast, multi-tiered, Matrix-like abattoir where their blood is systematically drained. Still, it's not enough. As I learn from a fellow reviewer of Daybreakers, Peter Hartlaub in the San Francisco Chronicle, "the average human body holds approximately 1.5 gallons of blood." That's less than 11 bottles of beer, which your average jock vampire could quaff during...
...human population is depleted, there's worldwide panic, a run on the blood bank, with no bailout in sight...unless Bromley Marks, one of the major blood-supplying companies - Big Farma - can develop a blood substitute. The vampires are addicts; and if real blood is their heroin, this would be their methadone. Leading the experiment is Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), Bromley Marks' chief hematologist. But Edward doesn't have his heart in his work. When his younger brother Frankie (Michael Dorman), a soldier in the vampire army, brings him a birthday bottle of vintage blood (sang-real-a?), Edward snaps...
...movie thrillers like Avatar and District 9, the insider goes outside to join forces with the aliens. Becoming human is a painful process - exposure to sunlight in brief, sharp blasts - but for Edward, it's a chance at redemption. Vampires live forever, but on other people's blood. Only by being mortal again can he truly live...
...first and most beguiling part of Daybreakers introduces us to this undead society, where young women wear crimson lipstick and blood is sold at the equivalent of coffee bars - I'll have a double-frappuccino hemoglobin, please. Set in 2019, the movie has a retro-future look, naturally indebted to Blade Runner, but which the Spierigs and their design team have brought to artful life on a less than lavish budget, with cool blues and grays complementing the vampires' pallor. (You'll get another retro-future landscape next week in The Book of Eli, directed by another twin-brother team...
...makes it seem that everyone spoke into steel drums. Most of the actors are like plasticene puppets on a stop-motion movie set; their creators were so dazzled by their skills at art direction that they forgot to animate the figures. In standard-narrative terms, Daybreakers suffers from tired blood. No question the Spierigs are prime film imagineers. What they needed here was a director...