Night Watch

Night Watch was a box office record-breaking Russian film and their official selection for the 2005 Academy Awards in the Foreign Film category. (Just wanted to throw that out there.) If nothing else, the movie makes you excited for the
sequels (it is a planned "epic horror trilogy" based on a series of popular Russian books). One look at the trailer is enough to make you at the least intrigued. But my job is to let you know if it lives up to this hype and if it's worth seeing"¦ well here we go.

The basic plot is simple, but a bit complicated at the same time. It's your basic "balance of good and evil, and a chosen one will throw off the balance" world, but that's not necessarily the plot of this first chapter. It is mentioned, but the main idea is that
there is a virgin who sort of started this whole balance and she has been cursed and has the power to open up some sort of terrible vortex. There's a side story where the main character, Anton kills one of the "Day Watch" (who are vampires) and the Day Watch peeps are pretty angry. See, the whole agreement between good and evil is that the Day Watch keep the light side in check and the "Night Watch" (Anton and friends) keep the dark side in check. So we, as the audience, are pretty much thrown into a whole new
world of shapeshifters, vampires, inexplicable powers, and quite a bit of shaky cam. This, combined with an interweaving of simple plots (revenge, a chosen one, virgin who opens vortexes, wait scratch that last one), really capture you from the get-go.

Night Watch does a fantastic job of creating a fanciful, gothic-themed, frightening, underground world. It reminds me of a movie like Spirited Away, where we travel to a whole new world of imagination where there doesn't have to be
any logical explanation for anything. The sky's the limit with what you can do. This combined with remarkably innovative filmmaking really set this movie apart. If anything, this movie is wildly original.

They use special effects to the extreme but not too much that it takes you out of the movie. There's still a seedy underground feel that made the first two Blade movies so enticing. But even more than that there's crazy camera angles, ridiculous wide
angle shots, Matrix-like bullet time, and a bunch of other cool stuff I'm not going to get into. Actually, I will get into the innovative subtitles. When a vampire was hungry, the subtitles would drip red with blood. When someone was shouting, they would get big and shake and even come out of the character's mouth sometimes. It was incredibly cool.

With all these cool things, there was one point a little more than halfway

through, I for some reason stopped caring, and I don't think I was the only person in the theatre that felt that way. The filmmakers throw everything they can at you at the beginning, and then just kind of play around the rest of the movie. I don't want to ruin anything, but
right after an owl graphically turned into a human, the awesomeness stopped getting dished out to me. And then to top it all off, the movie isn't terribly climactic. None of the little side plots really resolve in a fantastically exciting way. There's a kind of twist at the end, but it's relatively foreseeable, and not confusing in anyway. For some reason, they felt the need to over-explain it and keep showing clips from the beginning so you'd understand. It was just a bit patronizing and annoying, and I was really hoping the
movie would just proceed as planned because I wanted to see something exciting. As stated before, that didn't really pay-off. However, this is the first chapter, and I still got the impression at the end of this movie that the next two are going to totally rule.

Movie Grade: B