Night Watch (2004)

July 1, 2018

After the fall of the Soviet Union and subsequently the Soviet film industry, the world had been waiting for the first great post-Soviet blockbuster. In 2004, the world had to wait no longer. Night Watch was released to critical acclaim and gained huge international revenues. The film would be the highest grossing Russian film at the time and the highest grossing Russian horror/suspense of all time. The film would use its huge budget to create a beautifully crafted vampire movie with stunning visual effects. While the effects hold up, I felt the story was a bit convoluted and the characters flat.

Night Watch is at its core a vampire film, but like many of the modern vampire stories, it expands on the genre with twists and additional elements. Nosferatu, the German silent film, came out in 1922 creating the genre of vampire films and would be followed by Bela Lugosi's Dracula in 1931 and hundreds of others throughout the following seventy years. By the close of the millennia, Dracula and vampire movies had been done so many times that the vampire genre had to expand to keep viewers interested. Night Watch retold the story of vampires as a centuries long battle between good and evil. A truce had been settled between good and evil with the evil becoming vampires who preyed on humans and the good as watchmen who attempt to curb the destruction of evil. The film as includes shapeshifters and "others" with additional superpowers to set the film apart from other vampire films.

The early 2000s were a time when CG effects were beginning to come into their own as legitimate story telling tools instead of just film novelties (rewatch Wishmaster to see what I mean). Film elements that would be too difficult, too costly, or impossible with practical effects now could be made possible with CG. Night Watch took this technology and ran it creating a CG aficionado's wet dream. While the film definitely benefited from the CG and certain parts would not be possible without it (the portal, the gloom, the shapeshifters, etc) there is so much CG that it eventually becomes distracting to the film. The film is dripping with style but at the sacrifice of substance.

I imagine seeing the film in the theater in 2004 would have been an experience but seeing it on my tv in 2018, I was unable to become absorbed in the film's story. The film includes so many different characters with little-to-no backstory that it is hard to become invested in any of them. The main character, Anton, is the only character with some backstory but even this is lacking. He learn from the first scene that he tried to get a sorcerer to perform black magic on his ex-girlfriend to get her back by killing her unborn baby. This adds a lot of ambiguity to the character which is always interesting, but that is all we learn about his past. Everyone else that comes on the screen appears and disappears with no sense of who they are. Perhaps it was intentional to make so many one-dimensional characters in a film about good versus evil. Either way, it does not make for good story telling.

There is also a twist at the end that is obvious from the first fifteen minute of the film. When the main character fails at causing the death of his ex-girlfriend's child, the movie jumps forward twelve years. We then see a child whom the character is supposed to protect that looks to be about twelve years old. Can you guess who the child is? You guessed it! It's his child.

Overall, the film has stunning special effects, it was well acted, and takes an interesting spin on the classic vampire tale, but ultimately it lacks a strong story and developed characters. Maybe they will build on these characters in the sequel...