So, writer-director Stephen Poliakoff has had a hissy fit with the BBC over their insistence that he needs to deliver a script before any new project is given the go-ahead. Seems the £3.7 million spent on his recent feature Glorious 39 was not a shrewd investment, having recouped less than £285,000. Rather than adopting a contrite approach, Poliakoff seems to have a serious case of entitlement, perhaps symptomatic of his gilded roots.

That said, I am not unsympathetic to Poliakoff’s situation, while — to put it mildly — not being a fan of the man’s work. Now, it’s wise to be wary of anyone suggesting that there was a golden age of any sort in any domain, but you don’t have to look too far back in the BBC’s history to discover that things were very different once. The era of Play for Today brought some startling drama to the screen, and writers such as Alan Bleasdale and Dennis Potter. The free rein they had (not the lack of g in rein: the term’s etymology is to do with slackening a rider’s hold on a horse, and is nothing to do with royalty) gave rise to the blossoming of some extraordinary talent.

But, at the same time, a lot of stuff the corporation produced was dreadful. For every Edge of Darkness there were several misfires like Triangle, a soap-on-a-boat travelling through sludgy waters under a slate sky. Doctor Who is rightly remembered for its classic episodes, but there were a lot of dismal ones in there too. And don’t get me started on It Ain’t ‘Alf Hot Mum. More control at the top doesn’t guarantee better drama — far from it — but it’s not a bad means of employing some kind of filtering. Which is what’s happening more and more. New writers are ushered in through the Writers Academy, and having been told the way the BBC likes things, are increasingly creating the scripts for long-established shows like Holby and Casualty.

You can like that or dislike it, but that’s the reality. And it has good and bad aspects. Also, comical ones. When I’d got through the door at Doctors and started submitting ideas, there was one I particularly liked that featured a ghost. My script editor liked the concept, but ran into a problem that she had to consult colleagues about: did ghosts exist within the world of Doctors? A small group of script editors and producers convened to discuss this issue, like a Church of England synod, wrestling with the issue of the afterlife in daytime medical drama. Never mind the fact that the ghost in the story was as bogus as those that featured in Scooby Doo, though was more sophisticated than a janitor with a rubber mask on to put those meddling kids off the trail. No, the spirit world of Letherbridge — the town where Doctors is set — had to be defined by committee.

That kind of stuff goes with the territory of working with institutions as big as the BBC. Poliakoff should consider himself exceptionally lucky that he’s been allowed to play with the toys there at all, and for as long as he has — but his ego and sense of entitlement are indicated by the fact that security personnel were called during his meeting with BBC drama commission controller Ben Stephenson.

If Poliakoff really is as all that as he supposes he is, then he should be able to discover his true worth on the free market. Find out who is willing to stump up the readies for him to bring one of his scripts to the screen, and how many people are then prepared to watch his new insights into the milieu of troubled toffs. How about doing a new project about a creative wunderkind who is cast out by those who nurtured him, and has to find his own way through a world of beastly financiers and cold commerce?

There’s an outfit — I won’t dignify or give them publicity by naming them — offering an online course in Advanced Dialogue, which will teach you 47 ways to make your dialogue sizzle and get Hollywood actors panting with excitment at the prospect of speaking your words. And I’m thinking ‘Advanced Dialogue? I don’t remember doing a class at any point on Advanced Talking’, which is presumably what such a hi-falutin’ concept calls for.

More to the point, which is more important: dialogue skills or listening skills? As far as I’m concerned, you have no business writing words to go into a fictional person’s mouth until you can demonstrate an ability to sift through actual conversations and remember what startled, saddened or otherwise affected you. The biggest tool you have for writing dialogue comes in a pair, one either side of your head.

Which isn’t to say that dialogue skills can’t be sharpened. But it starts off with that first hand experience, to which can then be added skills from the realm of linguistics. Nothing too technical, and some people have such an ear for speech that they don’t need that kind of knowledge. But I know that I’ve been assisted in my writing by knowing things like what a nominalisation is.

A what? OK, break it down. The first three letters — nom — will be familiar from the term nom de plume. They indicate name. The rest is a fancy way of saying something about the process of naming. In particular, the way that we capture a whole bunch of stuff that happened — a process, involving verbs — and put it into a noun. Like, for instance, the term ‘heist’. Which five simple letters mask what could have been weeks of reconnoissance work, planning, and the assembly of a team fit for the job at hand.

Knowing the word ‘heist’, we can use in in dialogue confident that the audience will fill in the blanks without us having to go into massive detail. Saves time, and allows the writer to paint with broad brushstrokes. We know that in Reservoir Dogs a heist has happened. Its details become apparent in the aftermath, which is what the story concentrates on.

Conversely, there are times when a nominalisation can be used to spring a surprise on the audience. Even now, when a character refers to being in a relationship, odds are most audience members will be thinking of a heterosexual one, especially since Hollywood is so homophobic about what roles actors play. The realisation that a character has a same sex partner counts as difference.

All of this, if you think about it, is to do with the pictures that audiences make in their heads based on the words that they hear. And you as writer are responsible for those words. As such, you have a certain degree of influence over the pictures too. Not total, because our internal imagery is personal, and your references and mine aren’t the same. But still, you do exercise a lot of control over how audiences think and feel.

All of which, by the way, doesn’t just apply to dialogue. Scene descriptions are just as important. Your job is to persuade the director that the way they want to film a scene is the way that you’ve implicitly described. And hopefully you’ve described it well. Either way, the director will get nearly all the credit for it, since they have more status. Get used to that, or start writing for radio or the theatre, where the writer is more respected — and less well paid.

Words have power. Bards way back when were feared because the power of sarcasm could ruin a man’s reputation. Politicians have speechwriters to work their contemporary magic — I still have no idea what George Bush the First was referring to when he talked about ‘a thousand points of light’, a phrase repeated in his speeches again and again when he was standing for office. But I do know that when people make mental images of lots of sparkly lights around them, it makes them feel good. And it’s by keeping curious about how language works when you come across it — in overheard conversations, in tv ads, in slam poetry and food labelling — that you begin to develop a feel for how this stuff works.

One way to look at drama is as a way of exploring the differences between people. And how those differences are expressed in various ways across different contexts. This was something The Shield excelled at. Presented with a show about cops, there’s a danger of them being pretty similar in many ways. But, as anyone who’s followed politics will know, the closer people are, the greater their differences seem. Which makes for great conflict.

Consider. Two people work in the same place. For one it’s a way of getting the money they need to get by. To the other, it’s a chance to acquire social status. How are those distinctions expressed in ways that a viewer can see them? Well, let’s say there’s a Christmas party. The first character might not want to come to it at all. The second will be there, and maybe use it as an opportunity to curry favour with management.

Then there’s the business of how those two people get along on a daily basis. Which is about whether you think of the people working with you as colleagues or friends. Again, what are the distinctions? A friend will cover up for you when you have a day off to see your daughter perform in the school orchestra. A colleague would be less likely to. But the same person might be willing to stand up for you in a team meeting in recognition of your conduct, where a friend may not consider your professional qualities in the context of your relationship.

It’s subtle stuff, and that’s as it should be. People make choices based on nuances. A lover’s voice tone can compel you to do things that logically you’d never consider. The same voice tone could become an irritant that leads to an argument three months later. And you wouldn’t even consider allowing such factors to impinge on the way you interact with someone who’s a business client.

Some years ago, I attended a computing course. And one of the students, it turned out, also taught a class there. Her dual status made me realise I treated people differently according to whether they were student or staff. That was an interesting moment for me, and it’s those sort of moments in which you can see someone’s wiring exposed as they reassess the world in the light of new evidence. Finding out that your dad is a heroin user. Your boss sings in a choir. Your postman has a PhD. The seeming dualities are resolved, become part of a new whole picture.

The roles that people identify with can take a lot of shifting. To non-Christians, it seems pretty straightforward that being a priest is a job for a believer. But among the myriad perspectives available to a priest is that the Bible is largely metaphorical rather than literal. And that’s just one of the paradigms open to those who identify with the teachings of Jesus — Father Ted isn’t far off in its presentation of different takes on Catholicism.

All of this is good fodder for scriptwriters. You don’t need differences as extreme as Axis and Allies for conflict to erupt. It’s there at every turn. Every choice we make, someone else has an opinion of — and that can open up a world of possibilities. And those choices are most passionately felt among those we count as our nearest and dearest. A group of Klingon speakers translating the Bible into their alien tongue fell out over whether to do a literal word-for-word translation or concoct a religious text that would suit a warrior race. Yes singer Jon Anderson recently lost his place in the veteran group when a soundalike from a tribute band proved more popular with his bandmates than the original vocalist. And Labour politicians are currently being grilled over the smallprint of how Britain came to go to war with Iraq. Situations like these bring to mind the Borges aphorism about the Falklands conflict — “Two bald men fighting over a comb”. And that’s got to be good for dramatists.

Creating a film franchise is an interesting business. Writing about the Spider-Man films recently made me think more about the ways that sequels function almost as a genre spawned by the original movie, calling back to it so that people who enjoyed the first can get more of the same kind of fun from the second and subsequent parts in a series.

Take James Bond for instance: where would Jim be without a villain with a foreign name and a distinctive physiological quirk such as weeping blood or a tertiary nipple? In Indiana Jones films viewers would be disappointed if the whip didn’t turn up somewhere along the line. Nightmare on Elm Street sequels had better involve a sinister janitor upsetting the lives of a bunch of hormone-fuelled teens. And so on.

Which brings us to Transporter 2. As is often the case, it begins with a sequence which establishes some of the ground rules for how the Transporter world works. Some lowlifes try to take Jason Statham’s car — a lovingly filmed Audi — only to discover that the driver is a badass with considerable fighting prowess. Next we come to the twist element, by which we distinguish one chapter of a franchise from another — Jurassic Park 2’s new angle was that some of the dinosaurs are smart. In this context, it comes when Statham’s driving job turns out to be to transport a cute kid home from school. Another aspect is a French presence in the story: the first film was set in France, this one is in Miami and Statham pays host to a French friend.

The main business on Statham’s agenda is a constant: creative demonstrations of martial arts based violence giving the driver a chance to improvise ways of sorting his opponents out. And there’s no shortage of those. Statham inventively despatches bad guys armed with firemans’ axes by taking them down with first a scaffolding pole and then a firehose, using it to tangle and trap henchmen and then filling it full of water so that they fly off in all directions. Oh, and he shows off his superlative driving skills by driving over a narrow alley so that the car’s wheels touch buildings either side of the gap.

Basically, Statham is Batman without the cape and code against killing. He’s a smart thinker, a supercapable fighter, and above all else you know he’ll commit to his mission — in this case fulfilling his promise to the young boy that he’ll look after him. Of that there is no question. You know the bad guys will be thwarted — it’s just a matter of how inventively and when. And thankfully the film delivers, with an expertly constructed and executed story that sees Statham take on the baddies while being under suspicion by the cops, seeing off the goons before tracking down the guy in charge of the operation.

As written by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen and directed by Louis Leterrier it’s a fast, taut, and often funny film that packs the action of a full length feature into its first hour before a skilful segue into a final act — the young boy was targeted because he’s the son of a man who will speak at a conference packed with people from around the world working against the drug trade. The bad guys pump the kid full of a custom virus that he gives to everyone he comes in contact with, and they in turn to people around them…an opportunity to get the dad to off the cream of the international drug policing community.

Gadzooks, the consequences of such a fiendish plot would be catastrophic! Statham’s got to act, and the bad guy personalises things by pumping his own body full of the only stock of antidote. Cue ridiculous fight scene in a jet plummeting from the sky, and other high octane nonsense that gave me a grin pretty much the duration of the film. A lot of people are dismissive of action thrillers like this, dismissing them as braindead — but watch Transporter 2 and you’ll realise just how much intelligence goes into crafting entertainment that slips down so easily.

Nothing here to speak of today. But there’s a big piece by me about Sam Raimi’s trilogy of Spider-Man films over at Debatable Spaces, the excellent site run by scriptwriter, script editor, and science fiction novelist Philip Palmer, who shares the same initials as Peter Parker…hmm.

What are you waiting for?

Shoo!

For a few minutes today, I wanted to cause someone serious pain. An arrangement that seemed locked down was turned over by someone who had no intention of honouring their initial commitment. Not that he told me directly: instead the news was relayed by a young woman working for him. She was blameless, he…I imagined holding him by the throat, squeezing until his eyes bulged. Only, I’m not cut out for that kind of thing, and it helps if you’re doing that sort of stuff to have dependable back-up.

Still, while it lasted, that vengeful fantasy was an enjoyable one. And that explains some of the appeal of Sons of Anarchy, which follows the ins and outs of a gang of outlaw bikers. Developed by Kurt Sutter, a writer very much associated with The Shield, one of my all time favourite shows, the series cranks his previous one’s fascination with machismo and violence up a further notch.

As with The Shield, there’s moral ambiguity here. Where the police drama featured bad cops, this biker show has good outlaws. Or at any rate confused ones. At the heart of it all is Jax Teller, a second generation biker unaware that the club’s current president is his real father. The man he called dad is dead, and Jax comes across the manuscript he wrote outlining his vision for their two-wheeler society. It’s a utopian sixties vision that’s a far cry from the club’s present day reality of gun running and drugs,and Jax has ideas about taking the gang into a future less reliant on crime.

That dream doesn’t go down brilliantly with the club boss, Sam Crow, or Jax’s mum, the Lady Macbeth of the scenario. All of which bodes well for plenty of two-fisted action and intrigue as the series develops. Matters are interestingly complicated by Jax’s ex wife, who is injecting drugs while she’s pregnant, and whose life Jax is still very much involved with. There’s also inter-gang politics to contend with, the Sons of Anarchy being ripped off a bunch of weapons they’d acquired for a black gang, who want delivery of same to protect their drug interests. That in turn leads the Sons to take on the Mayans, a Latino gang who they’ve kept their distance from up until now.

All of which makes for quite the powder keg of a pilot episode. It doesn’t have the visceral intensity or shock ending that The Shield’s opener had, or a character quite as memorable as Vic Mackey to hold your interest, but that’s fine: this is a different show with its own identity to develop. I’ll be following its progress with interest, if only because violence is best experienced vicariously rather than delivered to actual people, however much they merit it.

Off and on, I’ve been tempted to develpo a series based on a bike gang I met, Soldier Blue, whose members were all former military men. The gang seemed to fulfil a similar function in their lives as the army did, giving them structure and the company of similarly motivated comrades. But there’s something about America as a setting that works better for such characters, for much the same reason that a song called Route 66 feels ‘right’ while one titled A66 doesn’t.

Sons of Anarchy is interesting too for having bad guys as its focus. OK, maybe that’s a cliche of its own in this post-Sopranos world, but it’s rich territory to explore, and I can’t help feeling that there’s a richer British take to be had on it than Hustle, which is fun, but ultimately froth. It’ll be interesting to see what new series the BBC develops given plans to axe some currently scheduled shows. Fingers crossed, they’ll bring us something with the potential of Sons of Anarchy.

In the year I was born, 1965, a film was released that painted a grim picture of life after a nuclear confrontation. Called The War Game, it probably still gets wheeled out to shock people to this day. Later, a tv film called Threads presented a harrowing vision of Sheffield after the bomb the year I went there as a student. But in truth, I’m fairly typical of my generation in being more taken with the post-apocalypse future as presented in the Mad Max trilogy, and the journey that Judge Dredd took through the Cursed Earth in the pages of 2000AD.

I’ve experienced my fair share of grim future scenarios in which rugged loners battle mutants and savage tribes coutoured by whoever styled Village People, and more or less enjoyed a range of films in that milieu from well known ones like Planet of the Apes to obscurities such as Salute of the Jugger. And then Cormac McCarthy comes along, and takes all the fun out of Earth’s death knell with a book called The Road.

Not that I’ve read the book yet, you understand. But I have just seen the film it inspired, and I think it’s fair to say my desire to see Tina Turner commanding legions of men with spiked leather body armour has dissipated. Writer Joe Penhall and director John Hillcoat present a scenario that comes across with frightening credibility, as a father and son travel across an America with sulphurous skies, derelict cities and burning forests, hoping that in reaching the coast they’ll find something like salvation.

The son’s repeated refrain is ‘Are we still the good guys?’, and it’s ever tougher to answer that question with the positivity the father would wish for as they encounter other people on their travels. Food is scarce, and the easiest source of protein walks on two legs. Cannibalism is the line that sets father and son apart from many of those they encounter, and it leads to some grim scenarios. Sometimes they’re potential victims, but there’s also an occasion when they come across a cellar that’s been converted into a larder and leave the human livestock to their fates while fleeing themselves. In the circumstances there’s little else they could do, and the story is about exactly such circumstances.

In stripping away the fantastic elements that most post-apocalypse films relish, what’s left is a truly epic story of survival. The father starts the film with a pistol holding two bullets, one for each of them in case they run afoul of cannibals. More than that, he even shows his son what angle to hold the gun in his mouth to ensure he’s killed clean and quick. It’s that starkness which gives The Road its power, and other choices are similarly loaded. Is it wise or stupid to share food with a stranger when you’ve only got what you can carry in a cart? Breaking bread together is the basis of civilisation, and in its absence what’s left?

There are no answers presented, just a clear depiction of the realities of life minus the social cushioning we’re used to. No wonder that the father is troubled by dreams of the past with his wife, and is so affected when he comes across a piano. There might be no place for music in the world of the story, but the soundtrack by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis forms an important part of the texture of the film, providing subtle colour that’s variously ominous, bleak, and nostalgic.

Beautifully filmed, and with note-perfect performances from Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee as the father and son, The Road is as powerful and unpreachy a message about the future of the world as you’re likely to come across. This is cinema of rare quality, perhaps even importance, though I’m aware as I say so that one day it’ll become just another DVD found in a landfill site a century from now. Let’s hope Tina Turner’s not the queen of that or any other wasteland by the time that future comes about.

As you may have gathered from previous pieces, Sexy Beast is one of my very favourite films. And now here’s 44 Inch Chest, with a lot of the same names involved. Ray Winstone once again provides a sterling performance as the lead, and the script is by Louis Mellis and David Scinto. Pretty much everything you’d hope for if you’re hoping lightning to strike twice, ignoring the fact that it rarely does, though director Malcolm Venville has a fair go at attracting it.

Winstone stars as Colin Diamond, a man whose life has fallen apart since his wife left him. See, she was seeing this other bloke. Sorry, a guy and not a bloke. Distinctions like these are central to a script that is as much an examination of masculinity as it is a story. In fact, you could say — but only a ponce would say it to Colin Diamond’s grizzled and grizzling face — that some fucker’s made off with the story and left the audience with just a situation. What sort of bastard would do a thing like that?

Fortunately, the situation that’s left is an interesting one. Colin’s got his mates together and they’ve gone and kidnapped the wanker what went and shagged Mrs Diamond (Joanne Whalley). Now, the French waiter is in this wardrobe, all locked up like, waiting for Colin to give the nod so’s the boys can get stuck into the creep. Froggie went a wooing, and he’s going to pay for it — with his life.

It all holds together well for the first hour, maybe more. With talent like Ian McShane, John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Stephen Dillane involved, and an absorbing, obscene and often hilarious script, it’s a fine ride the film takes you on. But then the brakes come on when Joanne Whalley turns up, and the film doesn’t recover.

Possibly this is down to the different geezers all being different types of bloke, where Joanne is emblematic of all women. Which is hard for any bird to pull off, if you ask me. The lads themselves…you’ve got Ray as a married man who doesn’t know what to do without his wife, and uses the vocabulary of pop psychology at times even when he’s smacking her round the house. Then there’s a guy approaching middle age who’s still living with his mum. A ladies’ man who knows the patter and how to light a girl’s cigarette. A vile Old Testament misogynist. And an actual la-di-da homosexual.

The interaction between the men is deftly written and performed, and tragically reminiscent of many all male conversations I’ve been in. So why do the wheels fall off when Liz Diamond comes onto the scene? It’s like the writers didn’t know where to go next, beyond some implication that women can play men and win. Which is fair enough as far as it goes, but doesn’t convince in a scenario when Ray and the lads were initially planning to skin both Frenchie and Liz alive.

Credibility goes out the window then, and instead we get a bunch of dream sequences. They’re fun, but also very self indulgent. I was reminded of the fantasy pieces embellishing Led Zeppelin’s live concert movie The Song Remains The Same to no good effect — another fine example of alpha males strutting around with more resources than sense at their disposal.

Still, the things that are good about 44 Inch Chest are very good indeed. The first hour is a wonderfully written, darkly perceptive exploration of what men are, or can be, like. It’s just a pity that there’s not more story to make it go further. Sexy Beast was all about the subtext, but here everything is on the surface, like a bulldog tattoo you wake up with after an ill-advised night out, that you never go back to get coloured in.

I have an odd relationship with fictional vigilantes. Call them superheroes, and I’ll read what they get up to. But a character who’s out to right wrongs at the visceral level and does so without powers, I find creepy. It makes no sense, unless it’s that unpowered vigilantes steer perilously close to the real world, in which taking physical action to right wrongs is fraught with moral issues. And, at the same time, some of my favourite prose in recent years has been provided by Lee Childs, whose Jack Reacher books are about a former military cop who gets involved in all kinds of righteous causes and resolves complex problems with firearms and fisticuffs.

Thing being, that Reacher is pretty cultured underneath it all. And has leftish sympathies unusual in the genre. Which makes him the poster child for frustrated liberals everywhere, an appealing fantasy in a world where Sarah Palin is taken seriously and assholes online argue that it’s pointless supporting plans to restore Haiti because the people there ‘won’t stand against the ragheads with us’.

But I draw the line at Marvel’s Punisher comic. Its protagonist, Frank Castle, is a grizzled Vietnam vet who goes out and kills heaps of people on a regular basis. Not much fun to be had there, though there was a legendary run by writer Garth Ennis that I have yet to check out. Anyway, the series has been reinvented under editor Axel Alonso, who has attracted interesting new talent to chronicle Frank’s mayhem — not least my friend, artist Laurence Campbell. And the thing is, Laurence is such a talent that seeing him apply his skills to The Punisher is like Steven Spielberg turning his hand to tv movies and ending up with the tremendous truck yarn Duel. His sophisticated visual sensibilities ensure that even when you’re reading a run of the mill tale about a psycho gunman taking down some drug dealers, it looks like a Michael Mann film, when The Punisher is more usually on a par with Michael Winner’s dismal Death Wish.

Laurence told me about a new Punisher comic he’s illustrated, written by fellow Brit Rob Williams. And it’s a doozie. The title, Get Castle!, correctly indicates that this is a homage to the superb Get Carter. Storywise, it follows Frank from New York to the valleys of Wales as he tracks down the killers of a friend’s son and takes them on. Oh, and those killers are SAS members, so you know there’s going to be some serious mayhem later. Excellent, and a fitting complement to The Hard Way, the Jack Reacher book I’d recently read, in which Reacher comes to Britain. Cathartic violence ensues.

Much the same comes about in Rob and Laurence’s comic. Of course Frank takes down the SAS guys, after getting to know the local territory and community, and the lowlife who live there. He checks out the local drugs scene, and the dialogue and behaviour come across naturalistically rather than as if portrayed by people who only know what they’re depicting through copying films and comics. Laurence’s art is grounded in reality too: no insane muscles here, or London buses travelling through Brecon: things are as they should be, and Lee Loughridge’s colour work gives the whole a suitably dark feel, acting on the page like a good colour grade does for the screen.

What elevates the story beyond its effectiveness as a routine thriller is the subtleties that artist and writer bring to their work. Laurence’s contributions you can get a sense of here in an interview with both him and the writer, but Rob’s take a while to sink in. It’s in the repetition of the phrase ‘I paused’ that the writer conjures something that strays potently beyond the boundaries of how these scripts are typically written. Each repetition presents a choice point for Frank Castle, a moment when he could go one way or the other. And it’s the insight into those moments that gives the story its power — and a very effective open ending, which you can see as light or dark, depending. Personally, I saw it as offering hope. But the next creative team taking The Punisher will take it all back to square one, as these things pretty much always work out in serial fiction.

I went to see Daybreakers expecting some undemanding fun on a wet afternoon. The trailers promised Matrix style vampire antics, set in a future where bloodsuckers form the majority of the population. Perfect Friday fodder in other words, without the need to engage my brain: eyecandy would suit me just fine.

The first sign that the film was something other than — more than — what I’d anticipated was a beautifully executed worldbuilding scene, maybe fifteen minutes long, without dialogue. Oh, sure, there was some information presented in text form, but for the most part the nature of this vampiric future was conveyed using images alone. And what images: there was demonstrable imagination at work here, and a lot of interesting ideas extrapolating what a world dominated by vampires would be like. This is just the sort of thing that gets up the noses of people who don’t like genre stories, but as far as I’m concerned it’s a better use of the mind to devise a convincing parallel world than it is to depict a crumbling marriage in this one.

Anyway, the vampires depend on milking the last remaining humans of their blood, keeping their livestock in drugged stupor. But stocks are running low — within a month, there will be none left. And that means trouble. Without blood, vampires degenerate from debonair playboys and WAGs and become monstrous creatures resembling the bats they’re connected with. Trouble coming every day, as Frank Zappa put it: so what’s a poor vampire to do?

Yes, that did read ‘poor vampire’: the protagonist of the story — Edward Dalton, played by Ethan Hawke — is a vampire sympathetic to humans. Showing charity to some mortals on the run, he’s asked by them to contribute to their own plans for some kind of vampire/human rapprochement. What Edward comes across is bigger than that. Much bigger. Inspired by a former vampire who’s regained his humanity, Edward manages to recreate the conditions for the transformation to happen to order.

Only, that knowledge is a threat to the status quo. Edward’s employers are doing very well with things the way they are now. They want a synthetic blood product, which they can continue to sell, while reserving human blood for connoisseurs with cash.

All of this is realised with flair by the Speirig brothers, who jointly scripted and directed this pacy, well-constructed yarn. It’s refreshing to come across a non-sexy vampire tale: the abiding metaphor here is more a political one, with blood standing in for oil and lack of it leading to social chaos. There’s effective emotional content too: Edward’s relationship with his soldier brother cuts across the fault lines in the story. And there’s strong stuff going on between the boss of the corporation Edward works for and his mortal daughter, which is expertly and credibly used to trigger the turning point that results in the story’s denouement.

I won’t spoil the nature of that resolution, save to say it’s very well thought out. It has its roots in science of a sort, which the film has a dubious relationship with. There’s a scientific frame around vampirism that accounts for much vampiric behaviour, but at the same time vampires are still invisible in mirrors, which stretches credibility a little too far for me. That’s a minor point however: the story logic in general is unusually respectful of the audience’s intelligence. Perhaps too much so: I heard people puzzling how the end worked to each other as they left the cinema.

Daybreakers is an unusually good vampire film. In its own way it’s just as strong as last year’s superlative Let The One Right In, which is the weird Scandinavian indie single to the Muse-like stadium rock of the Speirigs’ offering. Well worth a viewing — and remember to take your brain with you.