I recently saw this film and had quite high expectations as it’s been lauded quite a bit from what I’ve read of it. IMHO: what a pile of crap.
Sure, interesting concept, but what an absolutely terrible story. The whole cursed woman thing? What was that about? The whole of Moscow is creeping towards oblivion with a typhoon hanging over the city and all because some girl didn’t like her mother? And the situation is resolved after the girl loudly declares she cursed herself… and that’s it. Hmmmmmm. The term anti-climatic springs to mind. Then there was the whole bit about the son and (how not a twist this was) he turned out to be the main characters child.
I saw what the film was trying to do, but ultimately found myself quite disappointed by how it did it. I was expecting a fantasy version of Men in Black but it was rather lamer than that.
Has anyone else seen this film? What did you think? Better yet has anyone read the book and seen the film and can say whether it’s lost something in the translation from literative to visual form? I’d quite like to know but don’t particularly want to read it. What mystifies me is why this has been spoken of in such high terms - or is it just that people are pleased to see mainstream films coming out of Russia?
It is the continuation of a story begin in Night Watch- in case you had not seen that. It probably makes marginally more sense if seen in sequence. It’s fleshes out the backstory of most of the characters.
I thought it was interesting how the (to me) incongruous musical cues and comedic scenes fit into the rest of the movie. It seemed more experimental to me- in the first movie the Night Watch are the “good guys” but they are treated with the distance and minor-key sensibility normally devoted to the antagonists in a movie. Then the second movie the Day Watch are given the “good-guy” treatment with quirky music and comic relief even though they are allegedly the bad guys.
Interesting and at times literally thrilling in terms of the action setpieces and visuals, some very strong performaces (especially the owl-girl when she was playing the male lead following a body-switch) but overall I was a bit confused by it and it felt poorly thought out. These are based on books, right? Has anyone read those?
Apparently there is a third movie as well, so it’s not supposed to be “Over” yet.
Second that. Night Watch, even though it’s in a genre I don’t normally read, had me hooked, and made me read the next two, although I did put the third one aside - it just seemed to me to be more of the same.
The books have reasonably rounded characters, and some of the language is more literary that I would expect from fantasy novels. Caveat: I read them in Russian and I don’t know how good the translations are.
Although the movie of Night Watch was pretty competent, it didn’t sustain my interest enough for me to watch it all the way.
Read both Night Watch and Day Watch about a month ago. I found them refreshing because of the somehow singularly Russian treatment of a fantasy subject… I don’t really know how to explain it and can’t come up with any specific examples right now, but there was definite “this is so Russian” feel while reading. I found Night Watch better than Day Watch, but I did stay up the whole night for both of them. I didn’t think there was any real closure at the end of Night Watch, though, which is the same feeling I got when I saw the movie, before I read the book.
I’d suggest actually soldiering on to Day Watch - I found it a much superior film, both visually and in terms of having a coherent and satisfying plot.
I thought it was the other way around. Regardless, they’re very different movies and it’s worth seeing the second one. Not quite sure how they’ll do a third, though.
That explains why I couldn’t figure out what the hell you were talking about in your OP. I was thinking, “Wow, it’s like we saw two completely different movies!”
I didn’t really “get” Day Watch, but that’s explained by my not having seen Night Watch. I’ll mention one thing that bugged me about DW, though: I decided to rent it after seeing a trailer on another DVD, and I felt that the trailer was more misleading than most trailers. I was expecting, based on the trailer, a fast-paced action movie with awesome CGI effects. After watching the movie, I realized that every CGI special effect in the entire movie is crammed into the trailer, and that’s all that is shown in the trailer.
I didn’t think there was any real closure at the end of Night Watch, though, which is the same feeling I got when I saw the movie, before I read the book.