Night Watch
Director: Timur Bekmambetov
Starring: Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Valeri Zolotukhin, Mariya Poroshina, Galina Tyunina, Dmitry Martynov
Good against evil, humanity in the balance, you know, the same old trip.
I had heard some really good things about this and its trippy visuals, so I was pretty stoked to see it. It turns out to be a fairly agreeable way to spend two hours [and it surely did zip by quickly], but I wouldn’t expect much more from that. Unless you’ve never seen The Matrix, or Buffy, or… anything really. If you’ve been Amish for the past 10 years, you might want to see this movie.
So after this prologue in which it is explained that there was some big-ass war between good and evil, and they called a truce and split into… you know what, I can’t even bother to explain it. Go to some other site and find out what the shit is going on. The point is there is, as always, good and evil, with humans in the middle. And our hero, Anton, can see them both, whereas they aren’t usually visible to humans. And he’s assigned to go find and protect this kid who is being called by these vampires… it’s complicated. And this whole thing is preceded by a long flashback that sets up the whole movie. Then it just starts barreling on with one set-piece after another and hopefully you’ll figure it out or be too distracted to care.
You know how foreign movies that are influenced by The Matrix or any number of other ‘cool’ American movies always seem to kind of miss the point or just get something [or some number of things] fatally wrong when they try to reproduce them? The freshest example in my mind is Godzilla: Final Wars, in which they went for a lot of Matrix-y [and X-Men-y] action, married to classic monster movie fun, and just ended up with a movie that was so flailing, frenetic, and desperate that it all just cancelled itself out. This one is less like that than many, but is still kind of in that vein. There are battles, weird spiritual imagery, cyclones made of crows, toys that sprout spider legs… and it all just doesn’t come to very much. Plus, everything is amped-up in dialogue, but doesn’t really come through in the story. You have the biggest cyclone ever in Moscow, accompanied by the highest winds ever, and yet everyone is walking around okay and we see no evidence of these high winds. The cyclone also takes about 17 days to develop, and then we’re told that they just stopped it in a nick of time. Similarly, there’s a plane that’s about to crash, and then we leave it to check in on our heroes, and when we come back to it after what seems like two hours later… it’s still just about to crash! Then we leave it again and come back again… and this kind of stuff goes on for the whole last half of the movie. And you know what that means: filmmakers who are more concerned with going for cool sensation and excitement without worrying if what they’re filming actually makes sense within the story. And I cannot believe the Russians submitted this thing for Academy Award consideration! THIS? After Burnt by the Sun?
As I said, it all went by quite swiftly and I was thoroughly entertained, but once it was over, I thought “What’s the big deal?” WHY is this getting such good reviews? I knew it was similar to a lot of things I had seen, but I couldn’t think of one in particular, until it hit me: This is Constantine. This is Constantine, but in Russian. The difference is that Constantine was in English [so we knew precisely how banal it was, instead of not quite understanding and assuming it’s better than it is], it was based on a comic people had associations to, and it starred Keanu Reeves, who many people don’t like. And I think that the only reason people like this and don’t like Constantine is that this is in Russian, and it’s a foreign film. Other than that they’re very much the same, from the clearly-defined factions of good and evil fighting over individual human souls to the need to have a mind-blowing special effect every few seconds. Thing is, I think Constantine had a much more coherent and compelling mythology and backstory. Ah well.
You could do worse. It’s fun. I don’t know that I think the rest of them are going to be worth sitting through, however, at least for me. I would definitely recommend that they wait at least a year and aim for late February again…
It’s entertaining.
Comments
All comments must be approved before they are published. Only approved comments will appear. You may also use this space to report typos and broken links.
I thought this movie was absolute crap
It made me kind of angry, it was so badly-paced, poorly-acted, and overall just nonsensical. It came out around the same time as "The Host" which also got rapturous reviews, but was just inane drivel. I think these movies just get pushed by hipsters who want to seem cool and edgy for liking a foreign film. This movie was ass.
...
It's been a while since I've seen this, but one thing I remember that sets it a bit apart from the usual Hollywood blockbuster were some interesting directorial touches. I remember this scene - I think it's when the Night Watch tries to track down the witch who caused the cyclone - where some guys are (literally) doing their magic with computers, and Anton is just standing around waiting for something to happen, and the camera... I can't even say what it does, but it's never pointed where you would expect it to be pointed at in such a scene, only instead of being infuriating as it should be by all rights, it makes you feel as if you're in the room, eagerly waiting for the search results to come in.
Part of the reason the movie is such a mess is that it all but removes the rules of magic and the philosophy of the Light and Dark Others (as the wizards are called in the books) and replaces them with a generic "chosen one" storyline. In the books, Light Others believe it's best if they use magic for the good of all mankind, while Dark Others think everyone is served best if everyone looks out primarily for himself. But that doesn't mean that Light Others are necessarily good or Dark Others evil: a Light Other could be a serial killer who murders anyone he deems too selfish, while a Dark Other only uses his magic charm to get out of parking tickets. Oh, and the books imply that the October revolution and all the subsequent bloodshed were the result of Light Others trying to better humanity.
Anyway, as you noted in your introduction Light and Dark called a truce rather than face mutually assured destruction, and are ostensibly playing nice while trying to recruit new potential Others into their ranks. That's where the kid - who in the books is a powerful Other, but not your generic Great Chosen One - comes in: the Light Others fear that if the balance power shifts too much by too many Others joining the Dark side, it will create a Domino effect where more and more new Others join what they see as the winning side.
If, at this point, you're saying "Wait a minute... so it's a cold war allegory...?" - give yourself a cookie. Most of the stories are mysteries somewhat in the mold of John Le Carré's spy novels, with Anton ostensibly trying to fulfill some mission for the Night Watch while secretly wondering if the evil he encounters isn't perpetrated by his own boss to further the cause of Light (which it often is). There are certainly no clearly defined factions of good and evil in the books.
I don't want to oversell the books. They're not deep philosophical treatises. But there is a lot more going on in them than what the movie showed.
Post new comment