Ethan Hawke plays another vampire named Edward in 'Daybreakers'

"Gentlemen we are starving. What we're talking about is only having enough blood to sustain our population until the end of the month," says one scientist in the opening dialogue of "Daybreakers."
 
The trailer that featured Placebo's excellent remake of Kate Bush's "Running up That Hill" looked amazing. I held off on watching it because the reviews posted on Rotten Tomatoes were mixed and getting worse as each day passed. But, curiosity got the best of me. It's a vampire movie, and everyone loves vampires.
 
The premise of the movie is explained in the trailer. It's a world that takes place nine years from now in a vampire society. They have run out of humans to drink, and are working on a blood substitute so that they don't starve. When they hit starvation mode, they become these winged, supremely ugly creatures called "subsiders" who've crossed the line from civilized vampires into something akin to zombies; monsters with no humanity left in them. Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is the country's chief hematologist and it's up to him to find a blood substitute that works. Moody, atmospheric music underlies their world and is bathed in cold, stark fluorescent lighting.
 
Some scenes are reminiscent of Gattaca, that glorious movie where Ethan Hawke had the same soulful, doleful eyes aching to be something better (or go somewhere better) than what/where he is now. In this instance, it's being human again.
 
He meets a band of humans who've been hiding out and looking for someone who can help them in their cause, and ends up finding a cure for the vampires. It's questionable as to who really wants to be cured.
 
"It's never been about a cure, it's about repeat business. And besides what's to cure," says Charles Bromley (Sam Neill), Dalton's boss.
 
I really wanted to like this movie. This wasn't your typical "Interview with a Vampire," "True Blood" or even "Blade" vampire category. It was original, and was supposed to represent something more with allegories to human consumption, oil, and the general sense that the bad parts of humanity will catch up to us in the very near future.
 
Jumpy horror effects made the movie just plain fun to be immersed in. There's a scene near the end where soldiers are tearing each other's heads and limbs off and blood and guts are flying everywhere in slow-motion glory. It's definitely a sight to see.
 
Willem Dafoe was great with lines like, "Living in a world where vampires are the dominant species is about as safe as bare-backing a 5 dollar whore."
 
But the overall movie itself was uneven; there wasn't enough character development, and it was trying to be too many things at once. Was it trying to be kitschy, deep, funny, or scary? Maybe it was trying to be them all, but I don't think the directors pulled off any of those approaches successfully.
 
The subsiders were cool, but they were in it for what seemed like three scenes. Bromley's daughter could've been interesting but she was gone before we barely got to know her. Dalton's brother also appeared conflicted, but like the daughter, suffered the same fate of disappearing too early after he's revealed to be more than one-dimensional. I get that these characters were there almost as bridges; to show us that not all vampires are monsters or even want to be vampires, and not all humans want to be vampires, but it was executed poorly.
 
Near the beginning of the movie, a vampire soldier is given an experimental blood substitute and his face and body erupts viciously into bubbling blisters, signifying that the substitute didn't work. The scientists give him a stabilizer and the soldier slowly goes back to being normal. Everyone breathes a sigh of relief. Just as soon as the soldier says something, he blows up and the room, the rest of the scientists, the window and I'm sure parts of the movie camera are covered in his blood.
 
I couldn't help but laugh and neither could the rest of the theater, but I wasn't sure if the directors meant that to be funny because the scene was so somber and had that foreboding music in the background.
 
Ethan Hawke said, "We are the antidote to 'Twilight' and 'True Blood.' We are an old school horror movie. My hope is we will end the inundation of the genre. There's always the saturation point."
 
It was definitely entertaining, and something worth renting, but it wasn't satisfying enough to be the clincher of all vampire movies.