Daybreakers/Headscratchers

The humans move a convoy of humans to safety at night. How very smart! Not only when the vampires have the least trouble getting around, but when you can't see them coming! True, the vampires can get around in the day as well as the night with their tanks and uniforms, but at least the humans could have seen them coming. Idiot Ball, indeed.
- I got the impression that normally they wouldn't, but they felt that time was short. There were blood riots in most of the world's cities and it didn't seem like the blood supply would last long. The humans decided to take the risk before the world was overrun with subsiders.
  - I thought it made a bit of sense, surely there are a few day-time cops (like there are night-time ones in real life) who get bored and just pull over anybody that just might be up to something. A convoy of trucks in the middle of the day might have drawn suspicion whereas normally a bunch of cars driving around at night wouldn't have raised an eye.
- I'm pretty sure that the driver mentions over the radio that there was some delay. But even that aside, they were heading into enemy territory to rescue survivors. That could be a several hour drive into the city from the wilderness. Now, even if you put aside things like vampire day cops and delays, what do you think they should have done? It's not like they can drive into town, pick up survivors, and then set up tents in a cozy back alley at night when they are most vulnerable. I'd sure as hell rather try to make the mad dash home then set up camp on the enemies doorstep, especially when it's painfully apparent they are actively being tracked.
Apparently it's only been TEN YEARS since the outbreak first started. TEN. And yet everyone is still living in a nice, advanced metropolis where people can drive cars outfitted with 390 degree cameras. I'm sorry, but that is complete bullshit. Even barring the severe social upheaval and trauma from 95% of the world's population being turned into vampires, the sheer economic changes would take at least several decades to recover from. Since mostly everyone is a vampire, that means the animal, agriculture, and water industries would be almost entirely obselete. The effeciency of other industries would be dramatically halved since workers can only be outside for half the day without heavy protective clothing. You're talking about completely earth-shaking alterations of a society and this is all supposed to happen ... in ten years. Buuullshit. Try setting this movie in 2060 and we'll talk.
- To be fair, we get an impression from news casts that the situation is very different in the rest of the world, especially in the "third world" countries. We also see many signs that the vampire world is a far different place than the human one, such as "children" hanging around in the middle of the "work day" (night), smoking and so on. I think it's safe to assume that not everything is "nice and advanced."
- There's that one homeless vampire so maybe not everyone lives in nice houses with flash cars. We only really see Norton's house and he's working in the one industry which is definately booming (blood) so he is going to be rich.
Why didn't humans use guns instead of crossbows to better defend themselves?
- Presumably ordinary bullets don't do enough damage to vampire physiology.
- They camp out in the wilderness. I think it's safe to assume that crossbow bolts, which are reusable, would be easier to produce then bullets. Even further, it's hard to employ stealth if you are lugging around a roaring shotgun. And if that is not good enough, Rule of Cool.
- These are more classical vampires. They're probably Immune to Bullets, which is also likely why their soldiers don't have chest armor. Humans figuring out how to effectively stake them is probably a fairly new development.
  - Staking... Vampires... New development? That's like saying "Well, they probably just realized recently that their pet fish needed water to survive."
    - Are you new to movies with supernatural threats? Characters being ridiculously genre savvy is the exception, not the rule.
Why did that one hummer try to pursue the heroes across the overhanging railroads? At least others were smart enough to stop.
- Because sometimes people are idiots. I guess sometimes vampires are idiots as well.
Isn't the whole point of the movie kind of undermined by the fact they got a working blood substitute at the end? Oh great, you've "cured" everyone of their crippling case of living forever so they can get eaten by the others, who can't get a hold of the new invention that would have fixed the shortage problems because everyone involved has been eaten. What am I missing?
- You're missing the part where they said that even with the substitute they would still farm the rest of the humans because the rich would still pay through the nose for real human blood. Genocide, slavery and rape aren't good things.
- Your two choices in the world are to be a vampire (which not everyone wants to be, no matter how great you might think it sounds) or to be locked in a living hell constantly having your blood sucked out, and at the point where the substitute is developed, it's no longer a choice... you get caught being human, you're not even considered a sentient being, you are a resource. This was going to continue whether the substitute was developed or not, and oh, let's not forget that the blood substitute would only be produced by a single company run by an extremely amoral, if not outright evil, man. That means that he would have effectively ruled the world, and not only did he clearly intend to abuse his power for all it was worth, he intended to continue treating humans in a way that might have made Goebbels wince. Some might consider all of this a rather high price to pay for an eternity of being pretty.
  - Whereas a lot wouldn't.
    - And those people are evil.
  - In my opinion, is a false dichotomy to think that the only two posibilities would be: force the cure on everybody to save humanity or use the blood substitute to let people keep being vampires and doom the few remaining humans to being farmed to cater to a few corrupt millionaires. You now have a cure for the ones who don't want to be vampires and a blood substitite for the ones who want to be. And the guy who wanted to keep farming humans is already dead. There doesn't seem to be a real reason for everybody not being able to choose whatever he wanted to be. And with a big enough number of people chosing to take the cure, humans would have a large enough population to be able to defend their rights. You even could cater to this "real blood lovers" market with voluntary and well paid donations if there is a big enough number of humans to suply it. Even without the blood substitute, you could still make it work, the movie seems to want you to believe that the vampires absolubtely need human blood, but the fact is the protagonist has been drinking pig blood for five years with only now developing a mild case of pointy-earness, and is enough a little blood from the love interest girl to make it disappear. So there's no reason everybody could be feeding on pig blood and take a few mililitres of donated human blood every now and then to keep the ears in the proper shape. Hell, more than a few would delay the taking of human blood the maximum possible only to be able to look like an elf :-)
If vampirism is transferred via some form of virus, then how in the world does it cause them to stop reflecting in mirrors?
- Is really said is caused by a virus? It seems to have a lot of the traits of the classic supernatural vampirism. No virus could make you ageless and immune to bulets, or make your body inmediatly catch flames when direct sunlight touches your skin.
- It spreads like a virus but the actual cause is left Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane at best. For all we know, calling it a virus was the closest way scientists could classify the outbreak and the description stuck.
- It's kind of weird to me that so many people assume that "magic monsters" and "science monsters" are mutually exclusive. What if it's a virus that developed magical traits? Or a magically-created virus?
And speaking of mirrors, more a nitpick than a headscratcher and maybe I'm not remembering this correctly, but wasn't the accident in the begining, when Edward and Audrey meet, caused by Edward looking at his pointy ears in his car's vanity mirror? After we had seen his empty clothes in the rear-view mirror in an earlier scene? Being a vampire gives you selective reflectiveness? :-)
- The scene clearly shows him using an in-car camera which projects his image on a screen. Apparently vampires have no reflection but do show up on camera.
  - Digital cameras. We see some television footage of empty clothes moving around early on, which is meant to be a riot in the third world or something. They're probably using an older camera and thus the vampires don't actually show up on it.