Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor)

Khonstantin Khabensky
Vladmir Menshov
Valeri Zolotuhin
Directed by: Timur Bekmambetov

Plot: The Others are an entire race of people that live just under the radar of humanity. They guard the dark and the light. Ten thousand years ago a great battle between their respective armies ended in a truce, when each general realized that their army was equally matched. Each human would be given the right to choose their destiny, whether to join the light or the dark side. In order to keep the truce, each side would build a police force to make sure the other side wasn’t trying to influence humans one way or the other. The dark side force is called Daywatch, the light side force is named Nightwatch. Jump ahead to the present and a little boy is born, one powerful enough to tip the balance of power either to the light or the dark side. Each side scrambles to pull the boy to their side without violating the truce.

Review: My first thought after walking out of this movie had to be: wow this has to be the most visually imaginative movie I have seen in years. This film takes a really interesting premise and adds some pretty mind blowing eye candy. It wouldn’t feel bad about comparing it visually to movies like Brasil, City of Lost Children, and Moulin Rouge, and that is really saying a lot. Night Watch has a definite arthouse-foreign film vibe and it is very obvious throughout the movie, that although it was inspired by American cinema, it was made thousands of miles away from Hollywood’s watchful eye. I don’t think you could get an American director to attempt a lot of the visuals in this movie, or a studio to buy in on it. Night Watch is a very hip, kinetic film without getting too pretentious and is just a beauty to watch. That said, I did have a few problems with this film. While I did enjoy this very stylish film, the sometimes frenetic camera work seemed to cover a disjointed plot and at times seemed to hide a lot of continuity problems. I think a lot of this had to do with me being used to watching American films. With American films, we expect certain plot devices to push the story along to its logical conclusion. In this film, things that I felt were probably necessary to tell the story were played down while a lot of the mundane was actually played up and was used to push the film along and seemingly important events would just kind of happen with no real explanation at all. This being the first of a planned trilogy, hopefully a lot of theses things will probably be explained in the next two movies. And strangely enough, although I walked out of the theater a little bewildered and not exactly sure what had just happened in the movie, I couldn’t help but be a little anxious to see what Timur Bekmambetov will be able to do with the second one. Overall, this was a very beautifully stylish movie and don’t worry if you feel a little confused trying to make sense of everything that happened. I personally just think we aren’t supposed to know.
 

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