Michael and Peter Spierig, who made a good low budget Australian zombie movie named the Undead that had effects ingenuity, have now leaped to big budget vampires. It is the logical conclusion of Lost Boys, vampire hunting with crossbows in John Carpenter’s Vampires, Blade, and then Underworld. It is the Gattaca you get from a bit of knowledge of the science. Can we not ‘let the right ones in’ and get back to Nosferatu? Vampires are a concept for movies not a concept that needs to be made into a movie. But no question, taken less seriously – for we are already pretending its America when it’s Australia – it is still a polished blood fest worth, as advertised, staying up late for.

The vamps have taken over the world, reversing it, and running it like a corporation. Only five per cent of the population survives as humans in rebel groups, who hug each other like Matrix revolutionaries. Vampires go home at dawn to bed pulling into their suburban driveways, and operate in the day using sophisticated technology to shield themselves from the suns deadly rays, powering along on fluorescent lit subwalks, driving in cars using cameras to see, and sipping blood coffee. We learn these things with the groaning metallic and strong Star Wars sounds of composer Christopher Gordon (Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World) in the beginning, but it soaks into the background and is eventually lost as we become cognizant of the plots inevitable trajectory. It is an interesting dystopia at first, but in action becomes what we’ve seen before.

Notably, Sam Neil is well worth watching as Charles Bromley, almost the spitting image of Bela Lugosi, he is the evil head of the corporation named Bromley Marks, who steals the show as the Count Dracula that farms blood and researches for a synthetic substitute. He shows some humanity – which is scant sympathy for humans, even his own daughter – but he is not interested in changing the status quo, it is his business after all. Like Edward (Ethane Hawke), a head scientist working for the pharmacology institute says in one of the scripts better moments, “Life’s a bitch, then you don’t die.” Edward has sympathy for humans and loses his taste for blood, realizing that the dwindling supply of wild humans will be the death of their vampire society, their life’s blood. He defects to the human rebels who live in the sunniest places.

Granted, there’s environmental symbolism here about our own destruction and use of finite resources. Bromley drinks the good stuff out of wine glasses and the quality of the vintage is marked by the taste of fear in it. Points for an environmental metaphor, we depend on the natural world for our drugs, particularly from tropical areas, yet this resource is being rapidly destroyed. A world of sameness and sterility is a dead world, eventually, or at least a degraded one. How long do wild tigers realistically have on this planet because of our taste for their parts?

The starving vampire population is slowly reverting into fiends living under the city in its sewers, starting to violently assault the society above; for the milked prisoners produce an inadequate quality and supply, and are themselves starting to die off. Edward is developing the pointy ears which are the first withdrawal symptom, but then he meets Elvis, a free joker played by William Defoe (Shadow of the Vampire), who was once a vampire himself and may provide the secret to ending the war between humans and vampires. That is, not before some tiresome transformations back and forth between one species and the other. Interesting, if not overly successful in making its point.