I bought my ticket to see "Daybreakers," went into the theater, settled in with my soda and snack (purchased outside the multiplex, of course) and waited for the film to begin. It opens with a brief scene of a woman writing a suicide note, walking out of her house into the sunlight, and burning to death. Then the title of the movie appeared on the screen, and I suddenly had a brain cramp. Somehow I had gotten it into my head in the moments between buying the ticket and the start of the movie that I was seeing "Legion." I must be getting old.
The woman who burned to death wasn't old, nor would she ever get old. She was a vampire who didn't want to live forever. In "Daybreakers," it's the year 2019 and most of the world is populated by vampires thanks to some sort of plague. All humans are being hunted down, captured and placed into farms where their blood is drained for consumption by the vampire populace. However, time is running out because humans are becoming scarce and the blood supply is being rationed, and when vampires go without blood long enough they devolve into a feral, animal-like state, incapable of thought, desperate to feed. A pharmaceutical company is trying to develop a blood substitute before everyone degenerates, and one of its hematologists, Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), hopes that such a product will allow humans to live freely once again. However, the company's head (Sam Neill) has other ideas. Some humans, hiding to keep from being captured, are helped by Edward, and when they learn he's a hematologist, reveal their secret: one of them was a vampire but has now been cured. Obviously, this is not a "Twilight" movie. It's actually a very interesting piece of work, and it's strange to me that the movie's release was pushed back -- it was filmed in 2007. My grade: B-plus.
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