As much of a classic monster lover as I am, Dracula and other vampire movies never much appealed to me. I was never able to identify with a main character confronted with such a peculiar and otherworldly menace. Daybreakers has the opposite problem. Its vampires are not as important as its depiction of society, so it benefits from speaking to our culture, but at the same time it suffers from bland storytelling and utilitarian directing. Daybreakers has a message, but it lacks the artistic touch so often characteristic of vampire stories.

You may be wondering why a science fiction-based website is reviewing a movie about vampires in the first place. In Daybreakers, vampires are the result of a virus, not a curse. There are many vampire-lovers that will be put off by this approach to vampirism, but it works for this film. In the year 2019, the vampire pandemic spread wildly and resulted in virtually all of society becoming vampiric. Humans refused to “assimilate” to the new majority and now exist in small pockets of survivors who are actively hunted by the government. Main character Edward Dalton is a moralistic vampire scientist working on developing a synthetic blood substitute so that the company he works for will stop capturing and harvesting humans for their blood, which is of higher quality than that of any other living thing. The company is seeking this blood alternative because of mass shortages throughout the country (and presumably the world). Through the course of the film, Dalton finds himself helping a group of humans discover a cure to vampirism, with the help of a guy who accidentally turned from vampire back to human himself.

The world of Daybreakers is one ruled by self-interest – a world in which economics, satisfaction, and survival are king above all morals. As such, the film demonstrates the horror of such a society. The human minority lives in undying fear of being either converted into the majority or farmed for their blood, not because the vampires need human blood specifically but because they like it. Even minority vampire groups – those who have been deprived of blood for too long and thus devolved into hideously mutated beings – are rounded up and killed not because they are beyond reviving but because the hegemony cannot integrate them into society. It is an ugly and painful depiction of majority absolutist thought.

So, generally speaking, this is a smart and relevant film. The details, however, are slack, providing little more than a means to progress to the film’s necessary plot points, not strengthening it themselves. The pacing, for one, is systematic. Dalton’s journey as an ethical vampire searching for a way to make human blood obsolete is methodically interrupted by basic action sequences – car chases, stand-offs, shootouts, etc. These interjections are so systematic that it feels they exist because the filmmakers don’t trust that their story is interesting enough on its own. This leaves little opportunity for them to build suspense through plot construction because the viewer will generally catch on and understand when the characters will likely be safe for a while.

Another problem is that the filmmakers are unable to come up with creative ways to deal with tense situations. It feels like every time an essential character is presented with an imminent threat, the writers fall back on the trick of bringing in a briefly forgotten character with a gun to save everybody. There is one point at which the writers do even worse. It involves a scene in which Dalton is arguing with his boss, Charles Bromley, whose daughter happens to be a human who escaped the world of vampires and is living in exile. When Bromley stresses the need to supply human blood to those willing to pay for it, Dalton retorts by asking how much Bromley thinks consumers would pay for his daughter. How does Bromley respond? Nobody knows (including, I suspect, the writers) because the film cuts to a new scene. I would say that it’s offensive that the writers bail out on us so readily, but it doesn’t seem that they’re being lazy. Based on how frequently such techniques are used, I honestly think that in cases such as these the writers simply couldn’t think of interesting ways to allow the scenes to play out. The solution they choose is to cheat and avoid the scenes’ conclusions altogether. This makes for too many disappointing moments and lost opportunities.

As a vampire movie, Daybreakers has an underlying horror component. This aspect of the film is riffed on occasionally but is used mostly for punctuation, not to create an overall frightening experience. In fact, since the movie goes to such lengths to depict vampirism as being the world’s status quo, making the film frightening as a whole would have been contradictory to its aims. The parts that are frightening, then, mostly rely on basic gross-out imagery and jump scares. There are two points at which suddenly-screaming bats are employed to do the trick, and there are more than a few moments in which the mutant vampires are displayed in their decrepit states of being. The problem with these latter scenes is that their focus is not on the horror of becoming something grotesque; it’s on the plain ugliness of the creatures. Therefore, after the first or second time we see them, we’ve gotten used to them. Daybreakers, by its nature, tends away from horror, but since it necessarily contains heavy traces of that genre, it would have been nice if those elements had been used more effectively.

This is not a bad or boring film, but it is one with too much room for improvement. It starts off promising enough with its sociological ideas, and its story takes an original slant on the vampire genre. However, it plays out with few directorial flourishes, and its script demonstrates too many shortcomings to be engaging. In this respect, despite the film’s originality, it would have done well to take some cues from the vampire classics.