Night Watch is a Russian-made supernatural thriller, set in Moscow in 2002. It was released in 2004, and quickly became the highest-grossing film ever in Russia, a record that stood for a year until its sequel,
Day Watch, more than doubled that record. As is usually the case with interesting foreign films, a US film studio, FOX Searchlight in this case, bought it and then took forever to release it here. I first heard about it back in the summer of 2004, and watched the Russian language trailer on a streaming webfeed and thought it looked fascinating.
Unfortunately, that was all I saw for many months. I
first blogged about Night Watch in April 2005, when the US trailer was released, and then the wait went on, and on, and on. The trailer for
Day Watch, part two of the planned trilogy, came out later that year... and still no
Night Watch. Finally, it saw the light of day in February 2006, and with it still looking interesting, off we went. What did we think? Was it worth the wait? To the scores:
Night Watch, 2004
Script/Story: 8
Characters: 5
Combat Realism: 6
Humor: 3
Horror: 6
Eye Candy: 7
Fun Factor: 7
Replayability: 7
Overall: 7.5
Awesome, awesome film. Malaya actually liked it better than me; she was all excited and full of, "Damn I liked that!" remarks as we left. I wasn't as enthused, mostly since I was turning over plot points in my head and deciding if I thought they worked or not. It's a fascinating, complex, densely-plotted film, studded through with awesome action scenes and very cool mythology and occult stuff. Like what we all thought and hoped Matrix 2 and 3 would be like, before we saw the soggy mess they actually degenerated into.
As I think back on Night Watch, 8 hours after seeing it, my approval holds strong, and might actually be rising. It was really quite good, and has numerous scenes with, "Holy shit that was cool!" potential. In fact, when the movie didn't work it was usually because it was too ambitious and tried too hard to be different and new. And I can hardly fault it for that.
I compared it to
The Matrix earlier, but I think it also
compares to Saw. Not in subject matter, since this isn't a gore-fest horror film, but it's similar in that this one also had a fraction of the budget of Hollywood films, yet had ten times more cool ideas and concepts, and worked because of them.
Night Watch is vastly more professional than Saw, with a ton of very cool special effects, but it's similar in that it's so much smarter and livelier than you expect of films in its genre.
Incidentally, just so you know, the film is in Russian. With subtitles. Malaya and me don't mind, but some people do. There is a lot of dialogue, but it's not so wordy that you're ever struggling to keep up reading, and I never felt like I missed anything visually while I was reading the dialogue. Also, they're the coolest subtitles ever; appearing from behind objects in the foreground of various scenes, printing down like computer words when someone is talking while working a computer program, turning red when someone mentions "blood" and so on, but they are still words.
The plot is complicated and complex, and has thrown off some critics (
Ebert, for instance) but it definitely makes sense and can be followed. Malaya and I both got it, at least, and we weren't taking notes or anything. There are a few events that require some suspension of disbelief for them to make sense, but since the whole movie is about people with supernatural powers and prophecies and such, I didn't think that was asking too much.
All you need to know about it to know if you're interested or not can be
seen in the trailer, a feature I highly recommend viewing. In a nutshell, the film is set in the modern day, a thousand or so years after the forces of light and dark declared a truce, lest they destroy each other in combat. Since then the two sides have lived quietly, unseen by ordinary humans, though they prey on us, from time to time. Each side has enforcement squads that keep an eye on the other side, and the light's is called the Night Watch. They watch the night, you see. (A small bonus point if you just realized what the Day Watch must be.)
Who's watching who? They call themselves The Others, and they look just like humans. Anyone can be born an Other, and no one knows they are until some stressful event brings it out. Everyone has a different power, ranging from curses to prophecy to transforming into an animal, and every Other can enter a sort of alternate dimension called the Gloom. An Other must pick which side he/she wishes to be on, and it's more or less up to you. All of the vampires and demons and such seem to be on the Dark side though, so I suppose sometimes your special Other power determines your fate.
There is order to their world though, with the Dark needing permission and permits from the Light to do things like, oh, drink a human's blood and turn them into a vampire. Things are changing the balance of power though, and prophecy says a virgin will appear at the center of a tremendous storm, and that a new Other will be born with the power to swing the balance to whichever side he/she chooses.
This sounds very wordy, but the film does a great job of explaining just enough to keep you aware, as it unfolds. Most of the info is shown, not told, and I have not even scratched the surface of the mythology and the plot, which is epic, but also very well-grounded in the characters in the film, all of whom get a fair amount of screen time and become real people, though few of them are actually human. Night Watch is also very clearly the first film in a series, since while it doesn't end in a cliffhanger, it's clearly setting up events for more showdowns and plot twists in film two. We'll definitely be there.
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