"Daybreakers" is a crossbow to the heart of "Twilight's" sparkly crap

Popular culture has taken a peculiar twist in the past couple of years, one that is psychologically revealing about the times we live in. The apocalypse rules at the cinema, with recent top films including ‘The Book of Eli,’ ’2012′ and ‘The Road.’ And there’s been a huge resurgence of vampires and zombies, most famously through the ‘Twilight’ films and books. It’s interesting to try and work out what it is about late-capitalist society, afflicted by economic and ecological collapse, that makes people want to settle down with, or even be, an undead creature.

‘Daybreakers’ is the perfect antidote to the abusive-stalker-mixed-with-moping relationship of Edward and Bella. It shows us a world just slightly in the future, where almost everyone in the world has chosen to become a vampire. Humans are kept in comas to be drained in horrific blood farms, and the few remaining on the loose are hunted by the military.

The society is still recognisably similar to our own, but has some high tech adaptations to the fact it’s inhabited by vampires. Sub-street walkways and cars with blacked out windows that can be driven by camera allow them to move about by day, for instance. But the real reason why this film grips you is because it’s speculative fiction at its best: a film about ideas, underlying it is an intriguing take on the problems that cut through the heart of our own society.

The main character, Ed, played by Ethan Hawke, is a top hematologist (that’s blood scientist) working on a project to develop and artificial substitute to human blood for vampire consumption. The reason for this is that with so few humans left in the world is approaching peak blood. His employer is the slimy and sinister Bromley (Sam Neil), a corporate magnate who is the personification of a corporate bloodsucker. He has gotten rich from human farming, and unlike humanitarian Ed, has no intentions of giving it up when a substitute is developed, declaring: “There will always be those who will be willing to pay more for the real thing.”

This is what made the film interesting for me-at its heart it is really an examination about our own society’s dependence on fossil fuels, and all the harm and problems that arise from it. Oil really is the lifeblood of our society, and in the real world huge military forces and oppression are indeed necessary to procure it for the use of the more well off.

The vampire world is capitalist to its core, and riven as ours by class divisions. As the blood supply slowly runs out the rich pull their private stocks of people out of their blood farm. When deprived for long enough of blood, the vampires degenerate into almost mindless hideous monsters that go around breaking into homes and attacking vampires who are still whole. They are known as “subsiders”, and they form a known, but hidden population within vampire society, living underground while everyone else attempts to ignore them, like the homeless in a human city. The consequences of poverty and inequality are less easy to avoid in a world of vampires though, and the ruling class are forced to confront the problem. Instead of seeing it as a problem of resource depletion and poverty however, they behave just like the real-world bosses. They hoard the blood supplies for themselves and militarise the streets, summarily executing the subsiders.

The main plot of the film follows Ed as he meets a human underground, dedicated to rebuilding humanity and finding a way to return the world’s population to being humans. This neatly ties up the allegory, as a minority seek a transformation that removes the dependence on a finite resource that is bringing about the slow death of society.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying the film is perfect. All this intelligence is interspersed with some hammy acting and some classic action movie chase-and-fight scenes. It’s half action blockbuster and half intelligent allegory about class society undermining the basis of its own survival. That said, a lot of the fight scenes are greatly choreographed and exciting, and visually the world-building that has gone into creating ‘Daybreakers’ is gripping. These elements not only make the film enjoyable on a non-intellectual level, they’ll hopefully get mainstream blockbuster audiences thinking about some of the issues raised.

The point for me is that ‘Daybreakers’ is at its heart a film about ideas. It’s about really thinking about the oblivion that we’re all blindly walking into unless we can bring radical social change to our own world. Critics often negatively compare science fiction to literary books, claiming they don’t have the same subtlety or nuance of language. This is far from always true, but in any case it’s not really relevant. Science/speculative/whatever you want to-call-it fiction is a different kind of communication, one that deals with ideas, philosophical problems and extrapolating the consequences of real trends in the modern world. So, to me, it doesn’t really matter that ‘Daybreakers’ is half silly blockbuster. Because in amongst that is a real core of relevant ideas about the current state of our society.