Five years ago, Ethan Hawke starred in the mostly pretty terrible "Daybreakers," written and directed by the Spierig brothers. He must’ve liked working with them because he’s reteamed with the filmmakers for "Predestination," and after premiering at SXSW this spring, the film is headed to the Fantasia Film Festival, and a new trailer has arrived. And while this would be the part where I would attempt to summarize the plot, the loopy narrative is perhaps best left to the official synopsis:
In mid-’70s New York, a man in a fedora slips into an office building’s boiler room, carrying a mysterious briefcase. He uncovers a bomb, and is attacked while struggling to deactivate it. He succeeds — almost. Horribly disfigured, he’s transported to his agency’s headquarters where he receives a new face. He’s a temporal agent, traveling back and forth through time, altering history, and his assignment — thwart the mass murder perpetrated by the so-called “Fizzle Bomber” — continues. New face, new place. Now he’s undercover as a bartender. He falls into conversation with a tough yet androgynous customer. There’s something off about the guy, who offers to enlighten the agent with “the best story you ever heard”…
It’s adventurous stuff, though our review in Austin didn’t dig it too much, calling it a good-looking movie that doesn’t quite come together, saying "it’s the work of a bunch of filmmakers who seemingly wanted to offer up a WTF-worthy twist ending and tried to reverse engineer a movie from it."
No release date for this one yet, watch below and check out some new images too. [Quiet Earth/Vlicious]
This has a very strong resemblance to Robert Heinlein's short story ALL YOU ZOMBIES. It even starts with a bartender and patron in a bar with a really good story.
It's kinda hard to screw up a Heinlein story if you stick close enough to it. PUPPETMASTER was still an OK movie. Even after Paul Verhoven did his best to screw up STARSHIP TROOPERS, it was still a good movie. An naked Casper Van Dien helped.
Day breakers was a good movie. It's been rated 6.5 by almost 90,000 people… That's a good average with a good count of opinions. Was it a great movie? No. But it certainly wasn't 'mostly pretty terrible'. What a crappy way to start a news update.
I guess Indiewire is going to be one of those sites that just won't like the Spierig Brothers. Kind of like how Roger Ebert never really liked David Lynch. Not that the SBs have created anything remotely close to Lynch's movies in terms of quality, but Daybreakers was an interesting movie. I think half of the movie(I don't mean first half or second half, I mean just different parts of the entire film) was executed very well and the other half could have been executed better. But considering it came out during a time when Twilight and company were running the show, Daybreakers was a nice film you could go see without the filmmakers thinking you were stupid.
Overall, I probably would have given it a B- or a B. As for Predestination, it has some great source material but if Indiewire doesn't like the movie then they probably didn't like the short story(if they ever read it). To be fair though, Indiewire has been one of the only websites that didn't like the film from what I've read. Small sample size and all that, but still, it's worth noting.
Hey! i liked the promo and looks like interesting movie. Can anyone tell me is he same actor in Before Sunset cz yesterday saw this movie on hbo defined and find him cute in that. So just want to ask is he the same one or not?
"the mostly pretty terrible daybreakers"? Watch it again dude cos u were clearly high. It's awesome.
Daybreakers wasn't terrible, douchebag.