Movie: Night Watch

So I'm a little late in blogging about this one. Seth and Crabby and I caught Night Watch last weekend. Night Watch is kind of a Matrix meets Underworld meets Star Wars, and it's from Russia. Those comparisons aren't really fair, because there's more going on here than just all that, but it's enough to give you a general idea for the movie.

The premise is this: there are creatures called "Others," which are basically beings of magical power that look human. Others make a choice to join either the light side or the dark side. Dark others become vampires, while light others apparently become corporate CEOs and garbagemen (no, really - they never touched on what a light "Other" was in mythological terms). A long time ago, the Others decided to stop killing each other, and instead enforce a kind of truce. They built two societies, which are basically underground police forces, to enforce it: the light side created the Night Watch, to watch the dark side, and the dark side created the Day Watch, to watch the light. When one side steps out of line, the Watch steps in to correct the balance.

There's a lot of decent special effects (I'm not going to compare them to the Matrix, because it's more than just another bullet-time ripoff), and they did some really interesting things with subtitles of all things - things that wouldn't have even been evident in the Russian version of the film. That added a nice, postmodern touch.

Another interesting concept was playing around with the idea that "good" isn't really all that good, and "bad" was kind of a relative term, too. The light side makes a lot of compromises in its fight against the dark, to the point where the lines between dark and light become pretty blurry.

However the movie was just "good," never "great" or "awesome." In a lot of ways, it reminded me of Highlander more than anything else - long-lived creatures fighting a final battle for the fate of the world, with the plot kind of a loose excuse for some interesting action. It's a little better than that, but for some reason it just never got to be as good as it could.

I'm holding out hope that the sequels (there are two planned) will make this one fit better in the greater story.