[In lieu of actual content, for the next several weeks I will present, at least, one review of an upcoming film each week. These are scripts that I’ve been paid money to read, and many of them contain watermarking, identification numbers, password-protection, and other ways of tracking what company it was sent to; because of this and my desire to keep my job, I will not offer downloads for ANY of the scripts I review here. Don’t bother asking.]
Here we are in the world of Daybreakers, in which vampires have become the majority (after some sort of viral pandemic) and the few humans left (5% of the total world population) are hunted for their delicious blood. After establishing this offbeat world and its central conflict — that vampire numbers increase while the “food” supply dwindles — the writers focus on hapless vampire hematologist Ed Dalton. He works for a pharmaceutical magnate, Bromley, who farms humans to provide blood for vampires. Ed, who’s conflicted about using humans, has the moral-balancing task of coming up with a feasible substitute that can sustain vampires without requiring them to kill humans.
One night, Ed comes upon an erratically driving car, which narrowly avoids hitting his sunlight-proofed Escalade. The car’s on the run from the police, because it’s filled with humans (including AUDREY, the de facto love interest). Ed surprises the humans by allowing them to hide in his Escalade while he lies to the police about where they ran off to. Once the police get a safe distance away, the humans leave — but not before Audrey notices Ed’s work ID badge, which identifies him as a hematologist. Ed continues home, where younger brother FRANKIE has returned from military service (in this world, the military simply hunts for human camps). It’s Ed’s birthday — which Ed deems meaningless, considering his immortality — so Frankie surprises him with a premium bottle of 100% human blood. Ed and Frankie argue about the righteousness of killing humans to feed on their blood.
Before the argument can get too heated (though it does get heated enough for Frankie to smash the bottle against the wall), they’re attacked by a “subsider” — a freakish sort of vampire who feeds on other vampires (and/or themselves). This is the sort of world they live in. Frankie and Ed dispatch the subsider. After the police sweep the scene, they discover the subsider was actually a neighbor who disappeared. Ed is incredibly disturbs and feels increased pressure to come up with a substitute. Later that night, Audrey sneaks into Ed’s house, announces that the vampire world is falling apart (citing, among other things, the opening scene — a child vampire committing suicide after deeming an ageless body pointless). Ed tells Audrey he can’t help her, but she gives him a note with a meeting place and time. After Audrey leaves, Frankie hears the commotion and wonders who it was. Ed says it was nobody, but Frankie is quietly suspicious.
The next day, Ed asks Bromley about whether or not a substitute will guarantee the humans’ freedom. He receives an unsatisfactory answer, so Ed decides to meet Audrey — at a wooded creek in midday. He’s introduced to ELVIS, a vampire who reverted back to human form. How? While driving during the day, he got into a car accident that caused him to plunge through the sun-protecting windshield and into the daylight. The combination of the sun hitting him just right and landing in some sewer run-off (which immediately squelched the flames) helped him to survive. Somehow, the sun restarted his heart. Ed is amazed. Audrey, Elvis, and the other humans beg him to help them recreate this “cure” in a lab.
Before Ed can respond one way or the other, the arrival of Frankie and a military unit answers for him. Now on the hunt as an enemy of the state, Ed is forced to flee with the humans. They take him to their hideout, an abandoned winery, where he meets more humans, some of whom are on their way out to pick up humans from a large group they recently came into contact with. In the script’s single least believable moment, a vampire senator shows up at the winery to encourage the humans’ exploits, because he believes a cure for vampirism is better for humanity than any other solution. A senator who cares about humanity? Such imagination!
While Ed performs tests to figure out what caused Elvis’s transformation, Frankie accepts reassignment to a unit headed by Bromley’s personal friend, a general. As a pseudo-loyalty oath, Frankie is sent on an assignment to pursue the convoy of humans moving through the desert (chosen because vampires fear the desert’s lack of cover and delicious human food), which carries Bromley’s daughter, ALISON. As Alison calls the winery to announce they’re under attack, Ed hones in on the cure. He refuses to leave, even though the vampire squadron has the drop on them. He forces Audrey to experiment on him. It basically works like a defibrillator, except the electric shock is a sun-reflecting mirror aimed at his heart. The third jolt gets Ed’s heart beating again — he is human. But Frankie’s nabbed all the humans and returned them to Bromley. Will Ed manage to bring the cure to the masses, or will the blood-loving vampires continue their reign of terror?
Take a wild guess!
Daybreakers is one of those scripts that revels in its own cleverness, going overboard with explanations because the writers want to show us they’ve thought it all through and covered all the bases. They create a vampire-dominated world that sometimes feels real but becomes frequently confusing — because, shock of all shocks, the writers didn’t think of everything. I jotted down a variety of interesting questions this script raises unintentionally (and, as a consequence, has little interested in answering):
The problem traces back to our lack of understanding of the vampire infrastructure. How much blood do they need? How many times do they feed per day? Giving even a passing sense of how much they need to feed versus how much they have to go around would greatly heighten the suspense and Ed’s own desire to come up with a substitute. Just saying “5% of humans remain, which gives us six months before we’re out!” doesn’t help at all — and even if it did give some sort of meaningful picture, it still doesn’t forgive these idiots for letting so many humans die. Unlike oil (the finite substance most analogous to the fight for precious human blood in this script), the blood is renewable ad infinitum if the vampires played it smart. I feel dirty for putting this much thought into how to properly store humans for the purpose of regularly bleeding them, but hey — these are the sorts of thoughts a script like this inspires.
To that end, the human brain develops biologically in tandem with experience. This is why certain experiences (like sex) have profound impacts on the brain if they are experienced before maturation. But if a child vampire’s brain can never “ripen,” how would they live with their increasingly adult experiences? That fascinates the shit out of me, but the script doesn’t take much interest in it.
Daybreakers reminded me a bit of that. Everything has changed, yes, but it all seems so quick and painless. Set it 20 or 25 years in the future, and I’d probably buy it. Better yet — set it in the present day but in a parallel universe where this vampire “virus” plagued mankind centuries ago, and we’ve progressed to a certain degree, but things are bad. I just can’t accept that, within the span of 10 years (I’m being generous in assuming the “2017” date implies this draft was written in 2007), a vampire plague would transform most of mankind, they would all pick themselves up and dust themselves off and revitalize the planet with vampire-centric improvements on current human technology, and they would find themselves careening toward a world-destroying food shortage. Maybe it’s not so much the time factor as much as the remarkable efficiency of the construction/manufacturing ends of it don’t sync up with the stupidity involved in the food supply.
If you read this far, you might be wondering why I’ve gone off on tangents about what amounts to backstory without addressing the narrative itself or the characters. The short answer: this script gave me nothing else to think about.
The story is becoming a Hollywood nuisance: a generic action script that tosses in horror movie tropes to make it seem a little more inventive. I love horror movies. I love action movies. I’d probably love an action-horror movie if someone ever made a good one. The problem is — nobody’s trying to combine the genre. They just want to make shitty action movies, and they think grafting an obvious horror gimmick onto it will make it seem unique. (Man, I can’t wait to rip into David Hayter’s Wolves, assuming it ever gets made. Spoiler alert: it’s the embodiment of this shitty sort of writing. Holy fuck is it a flaming turd.) So, to that end, there really isn’t much story, or much character. Everything’s just a bunch of gaudy jewelry to disguise how bland and unappealing the action sequences dominating the script are. (And can we declare a moratorium on shitty horror/action scripts using the “viral pandemic” thing as its “ripped from the headlines” explanation for How It Happened? It’s as sloppy and stupid as the many ’50s B-movies that used radiation as the default explanation.)
To put it another way: you know things are bad when one character has to ask another if Audrey is the love interest. They have no chemistry on the page, and no relationship develops. It’s one of those situations where Ed is the male lead, and Audrey is the female character with the most screen time — therefore, she’s the love interest. On the plus side, at least the writers didn’t devote any time to explaining the nonexistent chemistry in the action block or having Ed and Audrey banter about how “real” their relationship is.
But things get worse: throughout the script, the writers toss in boldfaced, underlined, italicized statements like BIG JUMP, SHOCK, or (my personal favorite) BIG SCARE MOMENT. Instead of, you know, actually shocking or scaring us. Really? This passes for writing these days?
Go through the synopsis, or read the script yourself (or see the movie), and tell me if there’s anything — other than the setting — you haven’t seen before, and better. Maybe that’s not such a big deal, because this script seems more interested in its setting than anything else. A script needs more than a unique setting, but the only thing Daybreakers has going for it is the relatively novel universe — and they even fuck that up. What a colossal disappointment.
Posted by Stan on January 5, 2010 4:54 PM