Day: May 3, 2012

Daybreakers took me awhile to watch mostly because I assumed it was supposed to be some sort of horror film. There is no elements of that though, just straight up action.

Action, with some science talk and lots of vampires.

It also has crossbows. You know. Because bullets “don’t hurt”.

Ethan Hawke is a vampire! But most people are. The world is mostly vampire, and they can all think still. No worries. But, there are less and less humans out there. And they are running out of blood. He works for a company that extracts blood, and has blood farms in order to help sustain the population, but if they don’t solve their issue, they will run out within a month. He is a farmer, while his brother, Michael Dorman, is a hunter who goes out to collect humans.

He also doesn’t drink human blood. Guess he feels guilty. Well accidentally he finds a group of humans, including Claudia Karvan, and protects them from being caught. Somehow they trust him, and he is a scientist, so they bring him back to their hide out. BUT WHY. There he finds a really weird looking Willem Dafoe…with bite marks! Yet he is in the sunlight. Heck, he is a human again. Somehow he found a cure.

So now that he is on the run anyways, he works on developing a cure for vampirism. Hopefully no one finds out, and tries to use this knowledge to solve the blood shortage by turning prisoners into humans. Like his boss, Sam Neill. Or his scientist buddy, Vince Colosimo.

I don’t know how to insert Isabel Lucas into the plot summary but she is a human too, and a rather important one.

Also, some weird ass shit is going on here.

I can’t help but think that a lot of this is supposed to mirror oil and energy. But if it is…what? It sounds like it is supposed too, but in the metaphor of the vampire world, the solution to the oil crisis seems to be forgo technology and go back to the way we used to be before oil. Aka return to being humans. Which is a stupid solution to energy use.

Doesn’t help that “use less” energy/blood and “find alternative solutions” to energy/blood have already been explored by these vampires, and it looks like they are fucked. Are they saying our world is fucked, and nothing will work except for a trip back to the 19th century?

I don’t know at all. Bad parallels. Bad acting. Weird cure and then additional way to cure at the very end. Not at all sensical.

Zombies!

And lawls?

Alright. It has been done before. But by the British, and no one likes the British. So an American version might be more crude, or at the very least, better graphics. I’m talking 3D stuff. Or at least flashy lights. It is a Zombieland after all.

Consider my dreams reached.

How did the zombie outbreak happen? Some bad meat or something, but it spread quickly like all zombie out breaks. And these get to be the weird ass fast zombies. Thankfully our hero, Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg) has a list of rules to keep him alive. Work out his cardio, be afraid of bathrooms, always wear a seatbelt, double tap to assure death, etc. Definitely don’t be a hero. This is a war! Because he was a nerdy shut in, he missed out a lot on the initial craziness, when his neighbor from 406 (Amber Heard) attacked him. Sucks, because she was hot too.

He meets Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a middle aged man who wasn’t good at much, but turns out is very good at killing zombies. They have code name in order to not get close to each other. Such as where they are from or where they are heading. He is a simple man, who just wants to survive, and really find a twinkie to eat.

They meet Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), who con them out of their vehicle and weapons. Shit is serious. Very rude. The rest of the movie involves them working to get their car back, possibly trusting strangers, and maybe even breaking a rule or two.

Oh, and there is a cameo by Bill Murray, which is great. Especially since I only like Murray when he is in cameo form.

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Home run right there.

Good things tend to happen when you take an already outrageous accepted genre and do outrageous things during it. Most of the jokes don’t come from dialogue, they come from the few actors in this movie behaving to real zombie situations. Turns out it can be amusing to watch a bunch of fat zombies in a grocery store getting their heads knocked off with a bat. Or riding in a roller coaster with a shotgun. Or hitting a zombie by driving by with the door open, for shits and giggles.

The plot of the movie pretty much boils down to “The world has zombie now, it sucks, try to survive”. Really the only plot I could give was just back story that we learn throughout the movie, since I don’t want to actually say the entire story. That’d be bad for the four of you who haven’t seen Zombieland.

Its a very enjoyable movie with a budget big enough to put on some pretty over the top awesome scenes.