Daybreakers (2010, The Spierig Brothers)

I was suitably impressed when I saw the Spierig brothers' previous directorial effort, the low-budget, sci-fi, Aussie cult-hit Undead. It was chock full of cliche, and it couldn't ultimately escape the boundaries of its limited budget, but there was a lot of energy, creativity, and vision behind it. I remember thinking to myself that it would be really interesting to see what these guys would do with a better cast and more money. As it turns out, Daybreakers is not the film to answer that question.

Somehow the brothers managed to score Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe for their second feature, and the first one to get a stateside and international release. Sam Neill is along for the ride as well, likely showing a little Australian patriotism in support of these budding homegrown visionaries. And while Daybreakers isn't without its inspired touches or moments of brilliance, the end product is much in the same vein as Undead-- a showcase for their potential that never really delivers in its own right. Perhaps just as they did their own effects work and wore several different hats on Undead, Daybreakers largely functioned as a training ground for the Spierigs to get their feet wet working with a larger budget and more toys. Perhaps their next film will truly deliver on their developing potential.

The easy hook is that Daybreakers looks like The Matrix... with vampires. There are similar themes: a futuristic world overrun where human are used as batteries; except that in this future the humans aren't feeding a giant computer program, but a world overtaken by vampires. One of the plot twists revealed in the trailers, that of a vampire scientist fighting on behalf of the humans against his people and eventually transformed into one of them, who then fights alongside them against the corrupt world he's escaped from, is not only a genre-bender never really seen before, but also rife with metaphor. Racism, sexism, homophobia, or classism... pick your -ism and let the metaphor work for you, particularly in a corporate-run world with dwindling resources. All presented against a slick futuristic backdrop with cool vampires. It seems as though the Spierig brothers had captured both of the required elements for lightning in a bottle: a blockbuster high-concept fueled with social relevance.

But as soon as Daybreakers begins, it's obvious that the Spierig brothers have made the film with an aesthetic half outside of mainstream appeal. The film employs the use of blue filters, perhaps to emulate The Matrix's green filters, but the end result doesn't play out quite the same way. Instead, Daybreakers is cold and sterile and somewhat flaccid. And where The Matrix hit the ground running with action and suspense, even in the way it built the narrative at the beginning, Daybreakers starts slowly, with little dialogue and less action, taking its time introducing characters and exploring its world with a very understated, introverted, and meditative pace.

There's still no doubt that the Spierig brothers are visionaries; the framing and cinematography look fantastic. And they obviously work well with their actors. There's one or two inspired, if brief, set-pieces, and another few sharp ideas (vampires driving cars in the daylight with the use of cameras and computer screens). But the Spierigs still haven't figured out how to balance their ideas or pace themselves. They try to do both too much and not enough at the same time. On the one hand, they spend a lot of time creating humanizing, three-dimensional characterizations that aren't simply black and white, but are chock full with gray areas. But just as with Undead, as the film's reels unspool and the brothers near the end of their alotted running time, they employ a hurry-up-and-finish-it technique that oversimplifies everything they've built along the way. Suddenly complexities are left by the wayside, characters are jettisoned and forgotten, and the plot is streamlined, undercutting some of its previous intelligence. Perhaps the brothers need to start their process by trying to do less and leaving room to grow as their story builds, or planning in terms of multi-film epics where they can evolve their narrative without the need for a third-act retcon that oversimplifies and undercuts. Either way, they need to safeguard against their tendency to continue developing detail until so far into the running time that an ending requires the desperate act of a fisherman reeling in a fish more powerful than his rod, one that ultimately requires him to throw the rod aside and whip out a baseball bat. The Spierigs obviously have all of the tools and all of the puzzle pieces assembled; now it's simply a case of putting everything together and taking the world by storm with a bonafide masterpiece.

6/10