Pat Coston Movie Reviews

Thursday, May 27, 2010


Daybreakers

I had never heard of this movie before NetFlix recommended it to me. It's a SciFi vampire movie that has some really interesting concepts. Somehow a bat virus got into humans turning them into vampires. It spread through the population until there were almost no humans left. This is a problem since the vampires live off blood harvest from humans. Once a vampire begins starvation, they begin to mutate into man-sized bats and can make a full transformation within weeks. These creatures would feed off other vampires or any humans they might happen upon.

These were true vampires in every sense. They had the fangs, the yellow eyes and immortality. They could also be killed by sunlight and a stake to the chest. Any wooden object thrust into their chest would cause a vampire to explode into flames. Sunlight would fry a vampire into ashes within 20 seconds.

Vampire scientists are hard at work to find an artificial blood that can be manufactured to replace the human blood. So far all attempts have failed.

One man claims he has found a cure. He was a vampire but accidentally cured himself by exposing himself to sunlight then snuffing out the flames after a precise time so that he didn't die, but his heart was restarted. The transformation happens within a minute with the eyes returning to normal color and somehow their fangs disappear instantly as well. They return to being human and can walk in the sunlight and do not explode when their chests are penetrated by wooden objects.

Any vampire that feeds off a cured vampire turns into a human. A vampire scientist gets cured and tries to bring the cure back but his friend scientist has found a blood substitute and can make a fortune selling it. He's worked for 10 years on creating artificial blood so he wants to stomp out any cure. He likes being a vampire. He's in perfect health, can smoke all the cigarettes he wants with no ill effects and can live forever. Sounds good to me.

I'm not sure what Vampire culture was like. Do they have babies or does everyone just stay the same age for life? If you were 10 years old when you became a vampire, do you stay 10 forever? Do vampires enjoy music and art? There was artwork on the walls inside the houses so they probably did. Do vampires love? This one businessman vampire loved his human daughter.

Life in the future in vampire world look pretty good. They enjoyed high technology and seemed to be living pretty good lives. They even had cars that could drive around during the day with shades windows and cameras to see in all directions. They could be out during the day as long as they stayed in the shade and away from direct sunlight. Indirect sunlight was OK.

Since they had a cure and had artificial blood, it seems they had the best of both worlds. Those who wanted to be human again could convert. Those who wanted to be vampires could convert. Those who wanted to stay human or vampire could stay and the two populations could live side-by-side together but the movie ended to suggest that humans and vampires are still human and that the quest to convert the world back to humans would continue.