Tuesday 15 March 2011

Daybreakers (the Spierig brothers, 2009)

Vampires, with a Matrix twist: in the near future (as it always is) they constitute 95% of mankind and the rest serve as a dwindling supply of food for the mass. Ethan Hawke, as in Gattaca, is the humanistic dissenter who seeks to reverse the tide, while Sam Neill more or less recycles his evil megalomaniac from Event Horizon as head capitalist bloodsucker who just wants to milk the status quo.
There's plenty of room here for black critique of the destructiveness of market forces, and more space to manoeuvre within the confines of a crowded genre is made by the upside-down premise of the human as the outsider. Both opportunities are largely wasted, and the whole collapses under the weight of having to engineer a resolution from a very half-baked set of internal scientific rules. All that doesn't preclude a sequel, of course.

5/10

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