Grade:
B

What’s it About?
In the future, vampires have taken over the world and humans are farmed for blood. The supply is running out.

What’s Its Bechdel Test Score?
1/3. There are two woman characters but they are USELESS. If you want to see a film that respects women, or is even halfway realistic in its portrayal of women, do not see this movie. It also has one of the most egregious and blatant fridging of a woman I’ve ever seen in my life.

What About Minorities?

D. The world is fleshed out with a few minorities in the background, and there are one or two small speaking minority roles, but it is still a majority (and not believably) white world.

It’s ten years since vampires took over the world and turned most of the human population, totally transforming society.

Ethan Hawke plays a vampire named Edward (lol), who works for a pharmaceutical company that farms blood from humans. The humans are cattle stock owned by other companies and hunted by the military. The corporation is also trying to create a synthetic blood to alleviate/profit from the worldwide blood shortage as the humans have almost been hunted to extinction. Edward is a hematologist and is in charge of the synthetic blood program.

Edward has also, despite being a vampire for ten years, recently turned vegan gone off human blood. He feels sympathy for the human chattel and is generally morose and depressed about his place in the world. Naturally, the story lies in Edward teaming up with renegade humans humans to find a way to end vampire dependence on human blood.

Friends, as cheesy as this may sound, this movie is pretty deep. It’s prescient, what with food shortages around the world getting worse and supply lines getting all gummed up in recent years, ie, numerous food recalls, the rising cost of rice, etc. Set ten years in the future, it’s the story of the very real possibility of the West running out of necessary supplies, this West just happens to be populated by vampires.

The future vampire world is set up really well. The first few minutes show what happened to the world perfectly, without any words at all. The movie uses visual techniques entirely, not relying on any captions (except for news crawls), or narration. It’s smart and non-condescending. There is a really nice, gloomy film noir quality to the vampire world that I was digging, and I could live in that world forever – except for the vampires of course.

One of my favourite parts was an Uncle Sam sign in a train station saying “Capture Humans”, as it’s now one’s duty to society to report any errant humans and not sympathize with them. Later when the blood really starts to run out and the vampires are rioting, the sign is defaced to read “Captured all Humans, Now What?” What will we do when all the far away things we rely on run out?

So humans are hunted down by the military, who are apparently employed by private companies that own human “stock”. Edward, working with such stock, has existential angst about it, but his younger brother is a soldier who tracks down humans for a living.

The relationship between Edward and his brother was the core relationship in the movie, and I was so refreshed by this. The first human Edward meets is a young woman, and they become allies, but there is no trite romance or sexy angst. This is a movie about vampires, friends, not angsty pale emo saps in love. The strong emotional core of this antagonistic relationship Edward had with his brother, and all the twists and betrayals therein, was a really strong part of the film.

Edward’s boss is played by Sam Neill, who is probably the sexiest evil vampire I’ve ever seen. Twilighters can eat their hearts out.

It’s also pretty scary, and incredibly violent, and pretty damn good.

HOWEVER

Some of the film falls into a kind of bland cheesiness. Ethan Hawke isn’t giving the best performance of his life, and when Willem Dafoe showed up the movie kind of lost credibility for me. Dafoe is just so hammy and ridiculous in this. And it’s not even just his performance, the whole character design is kind of stupid. He was my least favourite part. The best performance was from Sam Neill, for sure. He was great.

The special effects left something to be desired – however, given that this was a fairly low-budget film (by that I mean, it’s not a blockbuster), it was a good effort. The makeup on the vampires and the bat-people was pretty fantastic, and the CGI elements of the city was really good. And of course, all the blood was great. But the effects when one of the vampires was exploding in the sun, for instance, were when the budget really showed.

The worst part, however, were the construction of the female characters. This is a very egregious example of what NOT to do with women in film. Totally useless. They both just existed to be plot points, and they didn’t even have strong or interesting personalities to make up for it.

And one of them starts out so strong! As the first human Edward meets, this woman sticks a crossbow in his face and is totally badass. From thereon out she’s just along for the ride, not even being particularly compelling, and in the third act is a damsel in distress about three times. Making her Edward’s love interest wouldn’t have made anything better.

And the other one! Has about ten minutes of screen time and is killed, really violently, just to teach some male characters a lesson.

The novelty and originality of this movie was enough to make me like it, but the invisibility of women as actual people was really grating. Sometimes it’s easier to ignore in a movie than others, but it almost ruined this movie for me.

I would possibly see a sequel to this movie but I would expect the woman character to be more active. My expectations would probably not be met.