Daybreakers
Entry updated 7 December 2020. Tagged: Film.
Film (2010). Lionsgate and Film Finance Corporation Australia present a Lionsgate/Paradise production in association with the Pacific Film and Television Commission and Furst films. Written and directed by Michael and Peter Spierig. Cast includes Willem Dafoe, Ethan Hawke, Claudia Karvan and Sam Neill. 98 minutes. Colour.
Above-average sf Vampire film set in a Near Future where a viral Pandemic has turned most of the human race into nocturnal photophobic Immortals, who farm the dwindling human population for the blood they need to continue to drink in order to stave off degeneration into a subhuman batlike state. A liberal vampire haematologist (Hawke) working on a synthetic blood substitute becomes involved with a human underground movement who reveal that a cure for vampirism is being suppressed for commercial reasons by the marketers of the synthetic cure. The plotting is jejune at best, but the film's world has been thought through in unusually extensive incidental detail, and the use of vampirism as an allegory of oil dependency stands out from the red tide of other vampire fiction in its era. [NL]
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