Editor’s Note: This was originally published for FANGORIA on February 17, 2006, and we’re proud to share it as part of The Gingold Files.
It has long been reported that the third installment in the film series begun by Night Watch—the Russian horror-fantasy that was a huge hit on home soil and is finally opening in U.S. theaters after a long delay—will be lensed in an English-language version. And whoever made that decision is entirely missing the point. For it is the very exoticism of the Russian milieu and speech that helps set Night Watch apart from its Hollywood genre brethren; shoot a similar story in English, and it wouldn’t be terribly distinguishable from the likes of Constantine.
That was evidently part of the point; Night Watch represents a clear attempt to make Russia a player in the international blockbuster market. It’s chock full o’ big visual FX and action setpieces, and like any genre epic worth its salt mine, it starts off with a bang, presenting a tumultuous clash between no less than the forces of Light and Darkness centuries ago. Director Timur Bekmambetov, working from a script he wrote with Sergei Lukyanenko (upon whose novel the film is based), immediately establishes himself as a proficient ringmaster of big-scale screen combat who can also pull off effective details; the truce between these warring factions involves a representative of each whispering into the ears of a third man, whose face shrivels with age before our eyes as a result.
Bekmambetov and Lukyanenko, in fact, seem to have more cool ideas for images and strange beings than they know what to do with. Which is a shame, because a couple of their neatest creations (particularly a spiderlike critter with a baby-doll head, which has been a key element of the promo campaign) only get a minute or so of screen time before exiting the screen, never to be seen again. The duo plan to bring all three of Lukyanenko’s books in this saga to the screen, and yet Night Watch already feels like a trilogy’s worth of stories and characters crammed into one feature. It’s a nonstop parade of flashy visuals and digital FX magic that demonstrates both unbridled imagination and an aim toward speaking the international language of pop cinema.
And for those moments when the people onscreen are actually doing the talking, even the subtitles go berserk. Evidently taking a cue from Tony Scott’s Man on Fire, the translated words don’t simply appear at the bottom of the picture; they pop, shimmer, vibrate, vaporize and do everything but take a bow before exiting the screen. Call me old-fashioned, but this strikes me as a distraction from the onscreen drama, and an attempt to hipify the feature for younger audiences who “don’t like to read when they go to the movies.” There’s more than enough busyness happening in the film itself for the subtitles to have to compete like this.
All the flash and technical proficiency were reportedly brought off on a budget of only around $5 million, an impressive achievement, as the CGI and physical FX are on par with the best of Hollywood. Only a burgeoning genre-film industry could’ve pulled off so much for so little, and the modern Moscow settings provide a unique backdrop for the action. You may have seen epic Matrix-style battles between humans, vampires and other supernatural creatures before, but not among the tower blocks and other locations where Bekmambetov and company have realized them.
On the other hand, contemplating all this while watching the movie means that the storyline may not be holding your attention the way it should. You may have noticed that I haven’t attempted to summarize the plot yet, and I’m not sure if I could, with its ever-expanding tapestry of supporting characters and individual conflicts played out amidst the grander battle between the Night Watch and the Day Watch, whose balance is threatened with being thrown out of whack by the arrival of a prophesied Other. Our hero is Anton (Konstantin Khabensky), who stumbles into discovering his own identity as a supernatural being and has to avert the impending apocalypse by protecting a young boy who may be that Other. Perhaps his protectiveness toward this child may be connected to his guilt over trying to have the unborn child of a wife who had left him killed—his visit to a witch for this purpose, only for the Night Watch to show up and stop her, leads him to realize his paranormal status in the first place—but the movie is too busy rushing from one eye-candy setpiece to another to contemplate this for too long.
Ultimately, Night Watch’s convoluted and confusing plotting undoes the spell cast by its remarkable craftsmanship—and in that, it has too much in common with many of the Hollywood megapictures it seeks to emulate. It’ll be interesting to see if Bekmambetov, having made such a spectacularly precocious debut, can rein in these excesses and give Day Watch more narrative strength—and while it’s not completely satisfying, there’s enough in Night Watch to make the next installment worth looking forward to.
