Daybreakers

Seen at: Cinemark Greeley Mall, about six weeks ago

Imagine watching your favorite baseball team play. They are down one run, late in the game. Your team is at bat. One of your best hitters comes to plate and hits a long majestic fly ball. It looks like it's going to go out of the park and tie the game. But at the last minute it falls into the glove of an opposing outfielder, who nonchalantly makes the out and lowers his glove, as if he knew the whole time exactly where the ball was going to land. Bummer.

That's how I felt after seeing Daybreakers. It was almost a dramatic home-run, but then at the end it just fizzled out. And this from Lionsgate, alas!

The movie came and went so fast in the theaters that many people probably didn't even see the trailer, which showed frequently during action movies throughout mthe late summer and fall,. The movie got delayed in its release until after the new year, which meant the trailer played for quite a while, and let me build up anticipation of seeing it (especially through the spate of gawdawful fauxpire movies throughout the fall).

What a premise Daybreakers offered---a future (or alternative present) in which a disease of the blood has swept quickly through the human race by vampiric action. Most of the human race has been turned into vampires. The remaining humans are hunted and farmed for blood.

It is a post-apocalypse scenario, but a highly ordered post-apocalypse. This is because vampires are classical. In fact, they are often indicatory of the malformed remnant of pure classicism.

As I often like to stay: werewolves are classical morality stripped of classical order; vampires are classical order stripped of classical morality; zombies are stripped of both.

The vampire order in this post-apocalypse not suprisingly has nostalgic features, and resembles the U.S. in the 1940s, but with technology slightly more advanced than today. For example, vampires drive cars around in the daylight because of special shades on the windows and video cameras that allow them to see the road and navigate. The cities have sprawling networks of underground tunnels (the movie was shot in Australia).

On top of that, the vampire world is, not surprisingly, as corrupt and evil as today's Wall Street and military/industrial complex. On the scale of social commentary, Daybreakers was heading straight for a Nadia perfect 10.

The protagonist (Ethan Hawke) is a vampire hematologist, wracked with guilt of vampiric treatment of humans, who is looking furtively for a substitute for human blood before the supply runs out (which is about to happen). He meets up with some humans on the run. The story is driven by the meeting of Hawke's character with that of Willem Dafoe, who turns out to be a former vampire who has been cured, and returned to human status.

The story thus becoms about whether the rebel team can get this Dafoe cure to the vampiric world in time to turn them back human, before the blood runs out and all the vampire turn into goat people and die horrible deaths. It's a vampire blood cure thriller.

There's some good subplots along---vampire CEO father versus daughter (father played by Sam Neill with reptilian eyes). It all works right up to the climax.

What goes wrong? Well, like I said it's about a cure for the vampire disease. So far so good. But the rule of narrative in this case is that, all other things being equal, there should be only one cure for the vampire disease, namely the one that Willem Dafoe's character accidently discovered.

But at the climax of the story, all of a sudden, there appears a second cure for the vampire disease (discovered in a previous scene by the characters but not revealed to the audience). It is this second cure that resolves the story. The first cure (Dafoe's) doesn't even enter into the story at all. The end.

Got that? What a disappointment. This kind of thing really peeves me because it completely defanged, if you will, what had been a nice decent horror thriller up to that point. But one cannot fail on this level of story and still make a good movie. It just doesn't work.

Sadly, Daybreakers is not the only movie I could say this about. It seems to be the story coming out of 2009, that so many movies had the same kind of brain-dead plot problems. It happened across genres.

What's going on here? These are story mistakes that should never have happened. They certainly were never seen in any classical Hollywood studio movies, at least after about 1932, by which time the narrative rules of Hollywood cinema had been established. It's as if we've been catapulted back before this time, or into some dystopic future.

As a consolation for you, here's the awesome trailer for Daybreakers that I mentioned, which includes a nice use of Placebo's cover of "Running Up That Hill."
http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi4040294937/