Over the weekend, chanchan and I saw Night Watch, a Russian film that came out last year, and is scheduled to come out in the US sometime this fall.

Night Watch is an adaptation of the first book of a hugely popular Russian fantasy trilogy. The story opens with the forces of light & dark battling to a stalemate back in the 1600s. When both sides realized that no one could be a winner here, they started the Night Watch and Day Watch to make sure that both sides would be kept in check, and the balance could be preserved. Fast forward to present day - the Night Watch, who operate under the guise of an electric company in modern-day Russia, are still keeping an eye on the dark forces. They issue licenses to dark folks that allow them to be vampires, but if any of the vampires start acting up and going after people (they’re supposed to just chill out and sip on pig’s blood, I guess), the Night Watch comes after them, armed with special flashlights, sunglasses, and… well, that’s pretty much all they have. And there’s a guy named Firefly who drives a super-souped up huge truck that goes really fast. Oh, and some of the night watch folks are actually wizards that transform into animals (including Tiger Cub, Bear, and Olga the Owl), which is pretty sweet. The main character is Anton, a night watch guy that looks kind of like Eugene Mirman, and doesn’t have any cool animal powers. He stops some vampires, killing one in the process, which pisses the rest of the Dark Ones off big-time. Here’s where things get complicated - prophecies are fulfilled, people swordfight with flourescent light tubes, and a creepy baby doll grows spider legs.

The story is pretty interesting, and there are a lot of cool effects in the movie. It was a little tricky to figure out some of the plot points, but I would blame that on the poorly-colored subtitles more than anything else. I haven’t seen any recent Russian films, so this one was a pleasant surprise - it was definitely better than most of the effects-laden, big-budget action films coming from Hollywood. I’m looking forward to checking out the rest of the trilogy when they come out.

This entry was posted on Monday, July 18th, 2005 at 8:03 am and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.