Night Watch (The Movie)

The 2004 movie Night Watch has come to be hailed as “The Russian Matrix” – and one of the first blockbuster titles out of that part of the world that was successful on the internationally. It was picked up by Fox Searchlight and released in US in 2005 if I’m not mistaken. And just as most of the recent Holywood blockbusters, this one is not an original script either. It’s an adaptation of popular novel by Sergei Lukyanenko under the same title.

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The story is rather familiar – it is an Russian take on the “modern fantasy” theme known from such titles like Underworld. An uneasy truce is forced between forces of good and evil allowing vampires, wizards, witches and shape shifters to live besides normal humans in modern day Moscow. The truce is enforced by two forces: the Night Watch who makes sure the dark side doesn’t break the rules, and the Day Watch which prevents the light side from abusing the rules. While the good/evil dichotomy irks me a little bit the premise is nevertheless interesting. It creates sort of morally ambiguous world where uneasy compromises must be made so that good and evil can coexist. I found it appealing conceptually, but execution fell short of my expectations.

Unfortunately the movie itself suffers from a double dose of de-intellectualizing treatment. First, the director decided to simplify the universe, and fuck around with major plot elements and character stories in a truly epic Holywood style. Yes, Americans are not the only people who can take a great story and turn it to shit. This seems to be an inborn skill that manifests itself in film makers of any nationality, race or color. :P In addition the movie also downplays the major elements of the story such as the use of magic, various supernatural powers exhibited by the members of the Night Watch, the nature of the Gloom/Twilight (which is only hinted at in the movie) and focuses mostly on oh-so-fashionable vampirism. Underworld envy anyone?

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To add insult to the injury, Fox has decided that the movie was still to difficult for American viewers so they decided to do some “creative editing” cutting whole chunks of dialog out, switching the order of scenes, rewriting lines all over the place and getting rid of over 10 minutes of footage. Yay!

As far as I’m concerned what I watched was the Warriors of the Wind version of the movie – a heavy handed, hacked up edit that completely changes the message of the film. But then again who knows. I do not speak Russian so it’s not like I can watch the original to compare.

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I saw the dubbed version. I actually wish I got the subtitled release instead because the dubbing was dreadful. I hear the subtitles were actually quite creative in the international release. The sub-par voice acting definitely made it harder for me to enjoy this movie.

I felt as if this movie was rushing through the story skipping important parts. Even The Matrix action train takes brief stops here and there to explain to the viewer the nature of the portrayed world. In the Night Watch you get the very brief intro, an then almost nothing. No one explains to us what the Gloom – other that it is some magical dimension which can only be accessed by the specially gifted “Others”. Still, it’s portrayal is inconsistent. At the beginning of the movie the Night Watch conducts an arrest and interrogates an unauthorized black magic practitioner all from within the gloom. Some time later, the main character almost dies because he stays inside of it for longer than 30 seconds but manages to save himself by cutting his wrist and offering blood to the mosquitoes inhabiting that odd dimension. It makes no sense.

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And don’t tell me it doesn’t need to make sense because it’s “magical”. I don’t buy it. If you want me to suspend my disbelief, first give me a framework or a convention within which your universe works – then we can work from there.

Similarly the only two characters whose supernatural powers are clearly defined are shape shifters Tiger Cub and Bear. Guess what they can do? Anton, the main character’s power is very ambiguous and confusing. At first we are told he is a seer who can see the future. Few minutes later he seems to be exhibiting telepathic powers when he is tracking a boy being lured by a dark side vampire. He drinks some blood, so at one point I thought that he was a vamp himself but that is not the case. In the un-cut release he supposedly also had a jedi like power of persuasion. Sigh… I know that standard archetypes of vampire, telepath, precog, magician are confining and all but we have them for a reason. You introduce Bear and tell us he is a shape shifter and we believe you even though he never actually uses his power – but we instinctively know his limitations an his strenghts. You give us the ambiguously powered Anton and we are kept wondering what exactly is his deal. This is unfortunately the case for 90% of the Others we see in this movie. As far as we can tell their only thing mos of them can do is shifting into Gloom which by itself is not all that impressive.

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Oh, and Night Watch also imports “The One” subplot from the matrix. In the intro we are introduced to a prophecy about some exceptional Other who will change the balance between the forces of light and darkness. I checked, and this silly notion does not exist in the book. But, you know – there always has to be “The One” in a story like that. In fact I think the movie muddied the waters by trying to tell to many stories at once. If they concentrated mainly on the cursed virgin plotline and did not attempt to edit and inflate the importance of the Yegor subplot the movie would be much clearer and accessible.

The special effects are a mixed bag. If you keep in mind this movie had a very tight budget compared to Holywood superproductions, the quality of the CGI effects is not that bad. Part of this is due to the fact that the director decided to stay away from magic and superpowers as much as he could. Therefore they were able to pump all their CGI funds into the 4 or 5 brief instances in the movie where the CGI does come into play, and the resulting quality is quite good.

Then there is the truck… Protip: if you film a truck driving down the road at 40 mph, and then roll back that film at double speed it does not look like the truck is doing 80. It looks as if someone accidentally hit fast forward.

All in all the movie is not great. It’s average or even slightly below average considering the Fox edits and the horrendous dubbing. But it really made me want to read the book which is supposed to be deeper, more involved, nuanced, morally ambiguous and more thought provoking than this film.

[tags]night watch, Sergei Lukyanenko, Nochnoy dozor, movies, review[/tags]

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4 Responses to Night Watch (The Movie)

  1. Matt` UNITED KINGDOM Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    And don’t tell me it doesn’t need to make sense because it’s “magical”. I don’t buy it. If you want me to suspend my disbelief, first give me a framework or a convention within which your universe works – then we can work from there.

    Haven’t seen the film, but this is true – disbelief can be suspended quite readily so long as they stick to their own rules. As soon as anything isn’t even internally consistent it gives rise to awkward questions that jolt you out of the whole thing.

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  2. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux Terminalist says:

    Yup, precisely. I started reading the book now, and it actually made some of the scenes in the movie make more sense. The book puts them in context and provides brief, but compelling explanations as to how things work and why things are happening one way or another.

    In the movie shit just goes down with no rhyme or reason to it, and it ends up being a confusing, disjointed story. Just the fact that they removed almost all references to magic and spell casting and stripped Anton from all his powers just adds to the confusion. In the book he is not very powerful but can do basic stuff like Jedi mind tricks on people, light fire or freeze water and etc..

    Also the twilight/gloom dimension is explained in more detail, and actually plays a much bigger role.

    So if you read the book, the movie makes sense cause you already know the universe. Of course they messed with the story, characters and the setting (for example Anton’s boss is just a regional manager for Moscow – not the immortal king of the light side) but at least you know what is going on. If you didn’t read the book, you are lost. :P

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  3. vacri AUSTRALIA Mozilla Firefox Ubuntu Linux says:

    I started watching this film subtitled with a Russian friend, and he restarted it dubbed. He said that the dialogue was amazingly cheesy in Russian to the point of dragging you out of the story completely, and preferred the English dub. I thought it was a very pretty film, even though it was a bit of a stretch at points. Worth watching.

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  4. Luke Maciak UNITED STATES Mozilla Firefox Windows Terminalist says:

    Heh… I found the english dub to be very cheesy so I can only imagine how bad the original version must have been.

    But you are right – visually the movie is quite impressive, especially considering the small budget.

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