1. Daybreakers
At its heart, Daybreakers is pretty bloody (no pun intended) good film. It's an unabashed high-concept horror, the sort of film which takes a premise and runs with it to the nth degree. For what it's worth, I really love it. It's refreshing to see a flick which treats schlock with a perverse integrity and letting it play out in logical fashion. To that end, we get to see precisely what happens when the vampires win. Namely, everything become blood-centric, but we've got to keep the fossil fuel damn, I hit the analogy to dead on the nose going, so there's always a need to harvest humans. Unfortunately for the communities of Daybreakers, their supply of meatbags are dwindling again, got to love the analogy so they need to find an alternative. Rattling along in the background to this thinly-veiled ecology lecture is Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe, the former a human-sympathising vampire and the latter an Elvis-loving, muscle car-riding nutcase with a penchant for heavy weaponry. These guys effectively derail the vampire society by making humanity contagious. To make that more specific, if you take a bite out of a vampire whose become a human, you become human yourself. Taken by itself, this viral spread could be considered a good thing despite the development of a blood alternative, the higher-ups want to keep farming humans for profit, so surely, you can get the impression that this is a better solution to unethical murder. However, it really, totally isn't. Hell, it could be, but the problem is that by the end of the film when the solution is perfected, vampire society is so far diminished by the scarcity of blood supplies that your average bloodsucker on the street would vault over his own mother to take a human apart. Can you see where I'm going with this? The problem is that to make everyone human again is a laudable task, but in practical terms it'll cause an outrageous amount of exponential human death (just look at the soldier lobby scene) on a possibly society-ruining scale. I know you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs, but killing at least three quarters of the world's population just when they've turned human must seem a bit counter-productive to the human cause, right. Again, I get the need for sacrifice, but it's just when you've spent a film serving up the vampires as the bad guys but then throw a ton of humans into the meat-grinder, any attempt at a moral can fly out the window with the rest of the gore.