REVIEW OF NIGHT WATCH

Should you watch? And if so should you watch during the day or night? I'm of the opinion that it doesn't matter. This film should be equally empty for humans, "others", vampires, shapeshifters or any other life form that is unlucky enough to go in with anything but the lowest expectations. Forget the great trailers and the nice poster art and settle down for the cinematic equivalent of left over ghoulash.

Night Watch is about a war that doesn't involve you or I or in any real sense- the human race. Maybe that's why I just didn't find it very compelling. Then again a coherent, original story might have helped. But like most other films that treat the vampire as a sort of “other” locked into some great struggle Night Watch misses being a movie you can really care about settling in the end for visual bombast.

Underworld got it right for my money. A great visual aesthetic, married to fun action sequences and above all a sense of itself as a film that was there to be enjoyed not adopted as some sort of mythology. It could support video games, comics, virtually any narrative or image driven form because it knew the most important thing about itself. Viewer's interfaced with it as an excuse for delving into the fantasy of being an “other.” Themselves. What would it feel like to have superhuman/supernatural powers?

And Underworld, Blade, even Bloodrayne have re-imagined the vampire as a warrior figure, a conflicted soul caught between base bloodlust and the need for redemption/wholeness. But in Night Watch the vampire is imagined as merely a player among players who themselves may or may not be pawns in a confusing cosmic narrative.

The movie sets up it's central situation neatly enough. We learn that light and dark “others” have always existed within mankind and that those “others “ have, after a series of battles devastating to both sides entered into an uneasy truce. Shape-shifters, vampires, seers and other “others” have divided their dominion of the earth into day and night. They keep tabs on each other using the “other” equivalents of the FBI and that would be fine if the movie used that to the same sort of advantage that we've come to expect. But instead that serves as only background info and the result is plot mud.

To the filmmakers credit they try something not altogether original but at least different. We meet a young man who has been pressed into service by the light side as a seer who in turn begins to discover things about his past leading him in search of a young woman with a child who are also others. This is as much as I'll reveal about the plot since you can probably guess the rest anyway. But even this mystery leading to cataclysmic events never gets more energy flowing than the average made for TV Sci-Fi mini-series.

My guess is genre lovers will want this on DVD to look at repeatedly. Sections of it, particularly the owl transformation, are truly wonderful to behold. And the film does possess a certain gritty power especially near the beginning during the witch sequence. But it quickly becomes apparent that the film can't possibly tie up it's many unnecessary loose ends. At one point we show a plane in danger of crashing. A plane does indeed crash. Then we see a plane landing safely. Is it the same plane- a different plane? Perhaps this safely landing plane is from another plane altogether where the screenplay of Night Watch made sense. It's a question the filmmakers don't resolve for us. And what of the swirling tornadic funnel that seems to attract crows even though it contains nothing shiny? Don't funnels suck we think? Especially when they seem to appear only to disguise the bland Matrix did it better (heck Matrix two did it better) chosen one storyline that the film devolves into?

And what of the screaming woman? Trust me. When she screams you'll think “Where is David Lynch right now? He had a screaming woman in Twin Peaks didn't he? I wonder if he is still trying to get those silly temples built? Perhaps I'm watching an outtake from Dune? This movie is like Dune- it has a chosen one.

Perhaps I as a reviewer should take this film more seriously. Break it down more pointedly. The bottom line is, as good intentioned as Night Watch is, it doesn't deserve your money or more importantly your time unless you are bored, easily amused, or just plain desperate to see something work out for Russian genre film. I resisted the urge to go online and watch Night Watch all the through. The film has been made available that way but is sped up superfast- interesting marketing. Now I regret that decision. I am convinced that this is the only way to make this film interesting. At least then I would have been able to tick another film off on my seen it list withoutb giving away a full two hours of my life.