Daybreakers — I don’t even think I could explain how poorly executed this movie was. There is something of an interesting movie buried in here but it is extremely incoherent. In my opinion, the best narratives are logically consistent. That is, you start by postulating some axioms (in this case: (1) vampirism exists, (2) a vampire that does not drink sufficient blood turns feral, (3) a blood substitute may exist, (4) a cure exists). From these axioms you can then build a tale, for instance combining axioms 1 and 2 to create the human blood farm that is the setting of most of the story. Add in a dash of #3 and you get a pharmaceutical company dealing with diminishing returns from a decreasing human stock. You can continue this process to craft a decent and consistent enough story. And for about half the movie they do a reasonably average job of doing this.
Then they screw it up by ignoring two or three of these axioms altogether. Because these axioms get ignored characters start acting unlike how they did at the beginning; the plot frays apart. You get an ending which makes positively no sense. In fact they spend about two-thirds of the movie on axiom #4 only to reveal that the original axiom has a few corollaries that would otherwise change the calculus of the entire movie.
There is, actually, an elegant solution to this movie’s problems of course. It’s pure math: if (spoiler alert) drinking blood from someone cured of vampirism makes a vampire also cured of vampirism then the quickest, easiest way to spread the cure would be to hook up the protagonist to one of the blood bank machines. The infrastructure is all there to infect the rest of society with the cure, and yet none of the characters even think to use it? This creates a noble sacrifice, the movie has a bitter sweet ending that the characters are forced to earn instead of kind of falling into a successful result, and it creates a nice arc between the protagonist at the beginning of the film and at the end of the film.
