Night Watch

AFS@Dobie The most illuminating thing about the Russian sci-fi import Night Watch may be its demonstration that the divide between American and Russian youth cultures is growing ever slimmer and more irrelevant. Young genre fanatics everywhere seemingly want their movies increasingly louder, busier, and more mythologically dense. Night Watch (Nochnoi Dozor), the first in a planned trilogy of films based on the novels of Sergei Lukyanenko, provides all these things in spades. The film’s distinction as the all-time top earner in Russian box-office history has only been surpassed by the recently released second part of the trilogy, and its American distributors hope that American sci-fi and horror fans will greet Night Watch with similar enthusiasm. The adrenaline-fueled pace, death metal soundtrack, convoluted narrative, and abundance of computer effects should deliver the goods to anyone with a hankering for this kind of jolt. A new English-language prologue and epilogue have been added to Night Watch, which starts the film off on a worrisome track as we witness ancient mythological warriors calling an epic truce in their total annihilation-bound battle between Light and Dark. Fortunately, the film then jumps ahead to 1992, where the battle is still being fought by supernatural humans called the Others, who are divided into camps of Light Ones and Dark Ones engaged in the constant policing of one another. The Others are a diverse tribe of witches, shape-shifters, vampires, and other spooks. Though complicated, the details of the screenplay (co-written by Bekmambetov and Lukyanenko) make sense despite sounding goofy if put to paper. Clearly, Bekmambetov knows his way around the Matrix and Blade trilogies. The storyline again jumps ahead to present-day Moscow where the Light Ones discover the vortex of damnation in an apartment high-rise and try to save a little boy who has gotten the call, and the generals run the show from their modern executive suites. The allegories about the crumbling Muscovite situation in post-Soviet Russia are there for the taking, although Night Watch must certainly have a more trenchant appeal for its native audience. Despite the film’s abundant gory effects, its best technical achievement may be its English subtitles, which move about the screen for better visual and emotional impact, and sometimes dissolve into poofs of blood or other colored effects. Bekmambetov is a confident, original director, whose visions reveal him as someone to watch – beyond the next two installments of this trilogy.