It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Daybreakers: Written and directed by the Spierig BrothersThis is a movie about a world where vampires have taken over the planet and the food source is dwindling. This is a movie where world building is the core of the plot. It spends a lot of time showing what the world would be like in the day to day and the changes in societal situations as well. It introduces a conflicted protagionist looking for a solution to the problems facing their world. Bit by bit, what he thinks he knows about the way things work is not entirely true. His world is shattered until you're left with the difficult choices you have to make in order to make things succeed.I know that sounds like a sappy indie mumblecore style drama but it's not. It's in a movie where vampires have eaten everything they can and are now running out of food. When they run out of food, they turn into a bat person, a literal man-bat who lives on the blood of whatever they find. There's so much introduction that when you finally find out, there's almost no story left. It's that simplistic. It works. It's different especially living in the age post Twilight. I enjoyed the film for what it brought to the table. I wanted more. I wanted a more in depth look at a world starving. I wanted to spend more time in vampire land but it was not to be. You were here one minute and then the next minute people were being violently torn apart by starving crazed vampires.I give this movie a C.

I really did enjoy this, but thought it had much greater potential. Would have been cool to see more of the humanity collapsing side, and elaborate more on the cure being distributed. Obviously it wasn't a true story, so it was kinda far fetched. I just find it hard to believe that not any powerful official or government agency would be interested that they found a cure, and them not be able to spread the word.

Vampires have taken over the world and the last remaining humans flee for their lives in the protecting light of the day, hunted and exploited. As for the vampires, nothing much has changed from their lives as living humans. People still go to work with their coffees, cars inhabit the motorways and special occasions are celebrated with a bottle. Except that in this case the coffee is laced with blood, the cars have protections against the sun and the bottles are filled with pure, uncut human heart blood. But now they face the problem of human extinction. There are almost no humans left to feed from and animal blood can only sustain you for so long. So what are the vampires to do?Daybreakers does a few things very well. The society inhabited entirely by vampires is an interesting one and handled with the right amount of dry satirical humour. The story that starts to unfold as the vampires look for a substitute is not a bad one and the inevitable cure for vampirism that gets developed – because of course it has that cliché – is at least something that I haven't seen before.Unfortunately that's also the film's biggest failing. The original cure introduced is good and certainly not something you see in every movie. But then it gets shunted aside for the more clichéd cure mechanisms and the whole final third of the movie falls into mindless splatter, gore and butchery. Mind, it's not bad gore, especially given the modest budget, but it's still disappointing because the beginning had dazzled us with its originality and promises of something new and different.Still, the movie has its definite upsides and is worth a watch if you want a slightly different take on the vampire genre.

I've returned to this movie once after it's initial release and I'd imagine that I'll find myself doing that more and more even though I don't rate it all that high. The reason for that is the movies incredibly strong core concept that puts a fascinating twist on a vampire dystopian mythos. In Daybreakers vampires rule the earth and they are scavenging for the last humans in order to feed and survive. The story is told from the perspective of a vampire scientist working on a blood substitute but as the story unfolds it is clear that he's sympathetic to the human cause, which puts him in a minority amongst other vampires. Soon the vampiric society starts falling apart as the blood dries up and starving vamps go insane due to their hunger and turn into beings ruled by instinct rather than reason.What makes Daybreakers a movie worth returning to are these ideas of a vampire society on the brink of toppling itself due to it's own greed and hunger rather than the vampires being a mythological minority. This makes for an interesting twist on classical human tropes of greed, justice and morality. Unfortunately, and this is what ultimately holds the movie back from being great, the writers never seized this potential and instead this is a run of the mill action movie that chooses to use cheap plot points for thrills and effects rather than the larger themes for afterthought and world building.In a perfect world this movie would be slower paced and forty minutes longer where the plot isn't about Ethan Hawkes character Edward Dalton trying to find a cure and later survive, instead it's about Dalton slowly realizing his disgust with the way of the vampiric society as it's dark side becomes clearer and clearer as the blood starts to drain up. Willing human donors are quickly replaced by forced human donors and individual cases of blood charity becomes an industrialized farming. I want to see more of how the greed and desperation is a driving force and how that drives Dalton into exile and from trying to feed vampires through other means into seeing their greed as a road block that can not be solved without viewing vampirism as a decease. I'm rambling now but lost potential will do that sometimes. I recommend this movie strongly to anyone that is looking for one of the good vampire movies that are out there and especially to anyone that is able to see the greatness that this could have been.