Give Me a Break

It might be that I have to update my 2009 Top 10 Movies List once again. Well, might, depending on how you parse a technicality here.

This afternoon, I went to see the new movie Daybreakers. Its wide theatrical release didn't take place until just this weekend, but it debuted at film festivals last year, and it's officially listed as a 2009 movie. If you take it that way, then it's claiming a spot on my list.

You might be vampired out at this point in time, but Daybreakers is another story about vampires. But it comes at the subject material from a very interesting point of view. It posits a very near future in which almost the entire world population has become vampires. With the scarcity of humans on which the vampires can feed, the vampires are facing their own extinction if they can't find a way to create a synthetic substitute.

What really makes the movie interesting is the way it explores this premise. It's an action movie with a brain, and it's not afraid to touch on thought-provoking subject matter. It really explores the idea of what a world populated by vampires would be like. It draws metaphors between rape and unwilling conversion to vampirism. It asks lots of social, moral, and even political questions.

But it also delivers the fun action too. The movie is fantastically violent and gory; even if you love those sorts of movies, this film has some scenes in it that will make you cringe. There are car chases, fist fights, swat team assaults, and more. The movie has a strong visceral component to complement the intellectual.

The cast is solid. Ethan Hawke stars as a doctor (and vampire) struggling to find a synthetic blood substitute. The movie isn't nearly as profound as his earlier film, Gattaca, but it does play on the same field of sci-fi/fantasy with deeper meaning. Willem Dafoe and Sam Neill play significant secondary roles, and the rest of the cast is solid too.

I suppose my complaint is that the movie was so neat in concept that it made me greedy for more. There are a few aspects of vampire society that don't really get mentioned. Can they have children? What would that world be like? Are vampires with a conscience really such an aberration as they appear in this movie? (Hard to believe, since all of them were humans themselves just a decade earlier.)

It's really a shame this movie got relegated to a January release. It's not perfect, but it deserved better. I rate it a B. In my 2009 list, it would slide into the #8 slot, kicking the "wait, I just got here" Julie & Julia off the bottom.