At the beginning of the film, the short paragraphs like the preface were shot with great texture. A little vampire about the same age as Christine Dunst in [Night Interview with Vampires] chose to welcome the sunrise in the lush courtyard after leaving a suicide note. , That is, greet death. When the body no longer grows and the heart no longer beats, how much is there to expect from the so-called immortality? This is a movie with an obvious end-time complex, but the suicide incident at the beginning expresses the despair and human yearning for alienation. In 2019, vampires have replaced humans as the masters of the earth, and humans have become the only source of food for vampires and have become domesticated animals. They are filled with tubes like [Deep Space]. In Amnesia], human beings as "canned food" continue to provide blood, but even so, the outbreak of the food crisis has reached a critical point, just like the effect of the death of the world's youngest child in [Son of Man]. More and more vampires who can't drink plasma begin to be completely animalized, losing the last remaining humanity, and all this is irreversible. This is the first paradox thrown by the film, and it is also different from traditional vampire movies. The purpose of blood sucking is to preserve humanity.
As the BOSS in the film said, human beings are not extinction, but evolution. Human beings who do not want to become vampires are backward and barbaric and need to be eliminated by evolution. Here, the identities of humans and vampires have been exchanged. Vampires have become humans in the true ethological sense, and humans have become predators like countless animals hunted by themselves. They can only hide everywhere, even without the ability. Form the same human resistance army in [Terminator]. The structure of the film is actually extremely simple. It is very similar to the three bad movies of [Tearing Doom], [Magic Warrior], and [Deadly Violet]. They are all in a future utopian society where global changes are taking place. People within a system. Through contact with people outside the system, they began to question and confront the system. The difference is that the film does not focus on telling a story about totalitarianism and confrontation, but focuses more on various human paradoxes. In the film, William Dafoe, who was originally a vampire, was transformed back into a human being in an accident, and the necessary condition is the light and water that resemble death to the vampire. What is even more ironic is that people who have turned from vampires back to humans not only have antibodies, but their blood will also counteract vampires and turn them back into humans. The final scene is officially based on this.
The film’s image style is basically a combination of [Moving Soul City] and [Stay], the former’s retro-style clothing and the latter’s use of colors. It's hard to imagine that the film only costs 20 million US dollars in production costs. It seems that the few scenes have helped a lot. There is no unscrupulous big scene blasting, and the plasma is used just right. The only two heavy taste scenes, one is the completely beastly vampire being headed, and the other is the BOSS transformed back into a human being sucked and divided by vampire soldiers. The scenes are excellent, and the horror effect is much better than sprinkling plasma. As far as the actor is concerned, Ethan Hawke finally got rid of the low-level image of punks and dung-diggers in [What Will Not Kill You] and [Stanton Island] in the past two years. This alone is worth celebrating. . It is worth mentioning that the heroine of the film, who looks mediocre but has an excellent temperament, has a very healing feeling in a desperate environment, and is an excellent candidate to play the role of Sara Connor. Another interesting thing is that in this film, the actress who plays the role of a coffee shop clerk looks very much like Marion Cotillard. When I watched the trailer, I was sure it was her, but when I think about it, she really doesn’t need to be a guest in such a role. , I checked CAST and found that it was not.
Although this film is a vampire movie, its spiritual core is actually more like Tsui Hark's [Hell No Door] in his early years. It talks about cannibalism and changes in human nature. When cannibalism becomes the norm, can people who don’t cannibal be called humans? Of course, compared to the immature [Hell No Door], this film goes further. The overbearing of the ending scene is neither by gunpowder nor plasma, but by layers of desperate hope. The younger brother of Ethan Hawke, who changed from a vampire to a human, became a living antidote for a vampire. The vampire who ate him turned back to a human, and was eaten by the surrounding vampires. It was like dropping a bomb in a group of vampires, radiating in a slow and cruel way. Humanity can only be regained by gnawing without humanity. Is there anything more ironic than this? This way the new world was born is neither a bright future like [Shimmer City] and [WALL•E], nor a genocide like [Deep Space Amnesia]. The film ends in the driving away of the three protagonists. The open ending also leaves us with questions. In what way will human beings resurrect? The various conflicts between humans and vampires in the process of resurrection. These questions may need to be answered by another film.
-Originally published in "Watching Movies"
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