Daybreakers

Daybreakers

Directed by Michael & Peter Spiereg

Runtime: 98 min.

While it’s hardly surprising that co-writer/co-director team the Spierig brothers’ sophomore feature Daybreakers was unceremoniously dumped into theaters by unadventurous studio heads in the first week of January, one shouldn’t take their cluelessness seriously: Daybreakers is so much better than they would have you believe. The Spierigs are a canny pair of Aussies that follow in the footsteps of Peter Jackson but, unlike that famous Kiwi, they did not have to wait so long until they were able to make their big-budget American entrée.

Unlike Jackson, who had five feature films under his belt before making The Frighteners, his first major American project, the Spierigs only had Undead under their belts before making Daybreakers, an inventive scifi horror B-movie about a future society where vampires vastly outnumber humans now dying from a lack of new blood. The Spierigs have done well for themselves: Daybreakers is being distributed nationally by Lionsgate Entertainment, whose slate this past year ranged from high-profile eco-doc The Cove to the sixth entry in the Saw franchise, and it stars Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke and Sam Neill.

That unprecedented level of almost immediate prominence and access to mainstream audiences is a sign of just how much roadwork an ur-nerd like Jackson has done in just a few years, paving the way for a new generation of genre filmmakers like Neill Blomkamp, whose debut feature, District 9, was one of the biggest success stories of the year (Blomkamp is now tapped to direct a film adaptation of the ultra-lucrative Halo video game franchise). That kind of opportunity was not lost on the Spierigs. For better or worse, in making Daybreakers, they took a cue from Jackson’s The Frighteners and restrained themselves enough to make a film more tonally consistent than their unhinged debut film. That kind of relatively subdued technique is unfortunately a double-edged sword.

Dour as its grey-black filter and its art-deco nightmare sets may be, Daybreakers takes place in a perverted version of the angular, glittering futurism of ‘50s American advertising. Daybreakers’ world is meant to be a dark mirror image of an ideal, Gernsbackian land of promise: humans are stored in a giant corporate-owned blood bank and vampires have pretty much wiped out all traces of fringe human life (the homeless are instead “sub-siders,” feral vampires that have gone without blood for up two weeks). Edward (Hawk), a hematologist hired to devise a blood substitute just one month before the supply of natural human blood is depleted (authority figures delaying life-saving decisions: who’da thought), has his doubts about the future of his race and secretly wishes he could find an alternative solution. Luckily, one finds him in the form of Elvis (Defoe), an ex-vampire that unwittingly discovered the cure for vampirism.

Though Edward is the emotional thrust of the film, he does not sustain intereste over the course of the film’s three acts. This is primarily because the Spierigs are more inspired when it comes to creating problems for Edward than they are at giving him solutions for them. Their eyes for detail are surprisingly acute but that doesn’t prevent the film resonant by its third act.

The Spierigs had no such problems with Undead because it relied almost entirely on its spastic ideawork than any kind of narrative or tonal cogence. Perhaps because they could not anticipate earning such a large audience so soon, Undead shows the boys at their deranged best, happily leaving the viewer with a myriad loose ends and a lot of questionable ideas (zombies, aliens and God: oh my). As it is, the few but salient outbursts of camp in Daybreakers make it look like the Spierigs were trying to compensate for creative constipation when the opposite is clearly the case. Hopefully, with a few more films under their belt, they will reach the level of craft that Jackson has. In the meantime, Daybreakers is more than adequate.