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timepiececlockNightwach is the coolest vampire/occult movie I've ever seen to have such absurdly uncool main characters. Seriously. The protagonists of this show are. not. cool. They are not the supermodel bodies of Underworld. They're... they're the Firefly to Underworld's Star Trek. That's the best way I can explain it. The grit to the gloss. Only more sad than funny.
Yeah, they do have cool superpowers...
But mostly they have flashlights.
The flashlights end up being a lot more useful than the superpowers at times.
You know how you watch Dead Like Me and think "Wow, it sucks being a grim reaper." ? You see Nightwatch and you're like "Wow, it sucks being an immortal superhero with magical powers."
The movie wasn't quite what I expected but it ended up being completely fascinating to me.
There's a chance you might not like it as much as I did. It was very dark, bloody at times, and the fights were rather disorienting (there's an actual characterization/plot reason for the battles to be so visually disorienting, but I don't want to go into detail about it), and the people weren't very sexy or very huggable. However, if you like monsters, fantasy, magic, vampires, psychics, spaceships, The X Files, or any other of a hundred sci-fi related things I expect everyone on my friends list likes.... YOU WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE.
It's Underworld, but smarter. It's Constantine, but grittier. Keanu's morose and world-weary John Constantine's got nothing on Anton. On the litmus test of moral ambiguity, Constantine's a choir boy in comparison. Not cause Anton's evil or anything, but... you just have to watch it.
Also? The subtitles were cool. I don't know how else to describe them except cool. They really utilized computer graphics to make the subtitles a part of the film. There's this one scene very early where a kid is swimming under water and bleeding out his nose. A voice calls to him and the subtitles are red, then they twist up like blood into the water near his face. COOL. And never so much that it got annoying.
And now, for the spoilery parts: Seriously. Watching Buffy talk in Russian to Dracula on a tv set in a Russian vampire movie in with English subtitles... HELLO MY META, MY DARLING.
I liked Anton a lot as a protagonist, not much as a person. I didn't particularly dislike him as a person, in fact I really felt for him through the last third of the film, but I don't think I'd like him in person, either. But as a protagonist I liked him a lot. He's the extreme anti-hero. I don't mean that he's the dork that becomes cool. He's a loser in the beginning, a loser in the middle, and a loser at the end. It sucks to be Anton, and half of it he brings upon himself. But at the same time he is compassionate, he does believe in doing right if not exactly in doing what the Light believes is right (though he's enough of a sheep to still buy into their system), and he clearly is WAY too emotionally wound up in his job.
I like that he wears a long trenchcoat coat, wears sunglasses inside, has psychic powers... and is still the least cool person in the room. He's unnoticable at first glance, creepy at the second, still kind of creepy, then sort of pathetic, and then scary the way that desperate people can be scary. He gets one cool kick in the film. One.
Also he's probably at fault for the end of the world, if not by accidentally cursing someone (oops!) then by being a less than perfect father. Sucks to be him.
Now the tiger woman... she was kickass. I really wanted to see her turn into a tiger again. I hope she turns into a tiger again in the next movie.
Plotwise, I don't even know where to begin. It was a very dense film, with strange pacing at times (it managed to feel slow or fast, yet still fit in so much information), but overall it was interesting. I want to see the sequel, like, NOW.
Other things I liked:
-the fact that the film visually showed how disorienting it is to be psychic. At times it's hard to tell if it's disorienting because supernatural stuff is happening, because it's just plain a disorienting situation, or because Anton's a seer and that makes everything REALLY disorienting. How much of what we see is a vision, how much is magic, how much is reality?
-the way that they deglamorize the monster-hunting profession. Keeping the balance is a sucky, sucky, sucky job. Maybe it's better if you don't live in Russia in the rainy season, but I can't imagine it'd be that much better.
-the animated fairy tale sequence. Very cool, and nicely transitioned to with the drawings of the boss guy.
-the attention to complexity and gray-area in the battle between good and evil. It didn't feel hammed up at all, it felt very honest and sad. Few movies succeed at making me feel anything for vampire/demon characters, but this one actually did. I felt for his neighbor, and a part of my heart did break for the line "They were in love. Maybe they wanted to be immortal together." And then with the vampire girl's accusation to Anton and the others about bait and "Where were you when he bit into me like food? I loved him. Why shouldn't I eat the boy?" That part was so interesting to me also because Anton felt for her misery, you could see he felt it deeply and had asked himself and his superiors the same questions, but at the same time he was completely ready to kill her. The actor did a great job of building that dichotomy: Anton is a killer, even though he doesn't want to be, even though he wants to think he's not so close to being like them.
Then again I could watch the movie a second time and have a completely different reading of his character. It was a very layered performance.
FINAL VERDICT: A-. Top quality fantasy/horror film, one of the best I've seen in a long time (probably the best I've seen since LOTR). It's weird, it's dark, it's visually arresting and it's foreign. It's creepy and I want the sequel very badly. I also want fanfic. I'm regretting not taking Russian in college because I'm not going to find much fanfic, I can tell.
((This movie also reminded me a bit of the original Highlander film. The very first one. With all the romanticism sucked out.))
watch the trailer
Yeah, they do have cool superpowers...
But mostly they have flashlights.
The flashlights end up being a lot more useful than the superpowers at times.
You know how you watch Dead Like Me and think "Wow, it sucks being a grim reaper." ? You see Nightwatch and you're like "Wow, it sucks being an immortal superhero with magical powers."
The movie wasn't quite what I expected but it ended up being completely fascinating to me.
There's a chance you might not like it as much as I did. It was very dark, bloody at times, and the fights were rather disorienting (there's an actual characterization/plot reason for the battles to be so visually disorienting, but I don't want to go into detail about it), and the people weren't very sexy or very huggable. However, if you like monsters, fantasy, magic, vampires, psychics, spaceships, The X Files, or any other of a hundred sci-fi related things I expect everyone on my friends list likes.... YOU WANT TO SEE THIS MOVIE.
It's Underworld, but smarter. It's Constantine, but grittier. Keanu's morose and world-weary John Constantine's got nothing on Anton. On the litmus test of moral ambiguity, Constantine's a choir boy in comparison. Not cause Anton's evil or anything, but... you just have to watch it.
Also? The subtitles were cool. I don't know how else to describe them except cool. They really utilized computer graphics to make the subtitles a part of the film. There's this one scene very early where a kid is swimming under water and bleeding out his nose. A voice calls to him and the subtitles are red, then they twist up like blood into the water near his face. COOL. And never so much that it got annoying.
And now, for the spoilery parts: Seriously. Watching Buffy talk in Russian to Dracula on a tv set in a Russian vampire movie in with English subtitles... HELLO MY META, MY DARLING.
I liked Anton a lot as a protagonist, not much as a person. I didn't particularly dislike him as a person, in fact I really felt for him through the last third of the film, but I don't think I'd like him in person, either. But as a protagonist I liked him a lot. He's the extreme anti-hero. I don't mean that he's the dork that becomes cool. He's a loser in the beginning, a loser in the middle, and a loser at the end. It sucks to be Anton, and half of it he brings upon himself. But at the same time he is compassionate, he does believe in doing right if not exactly in doing what the Light believes is right (though he's enough of a sheep to still buy into their system), and he clearly is WAY too emotionally wound up in his job.
I like that he wears a long trenchcoat coat, wears sunglasses inside, has psychic powers... and is still the least cool person in the room. He's unnoticable at first glance, creepy at the second, still kind of creepy, then sort of pathetic, and then scary the way that desperate people can be scary. He gets one cool kick in the film. One.
Also he's probably at fault for the end of the world, if not by accidentally cursing someone (oops!) then by being a less than perfect father. Sucks to be him.
Now the tiger woman... she was kickass. I really wanted to see her turn into a tiger again. I hope she turns into a tiger again in the next movie.
Plotwise, I don't even know where to begin. It was a very dense film, with strange pacing at times (it managed to feel slow or fast, yet still fit in so much information), but overall it was interesting. I want to see the sequel, like, NOW.
Other things I liked:
-the fact that the film visually showed how disorienting it is to be psychic. At times it's hard to tell if it's disorienting because supernatural stuff is happening, because it's just plain a disorienting situation, or because Anton's a seer and that makes everything REALLY disorienting. How much of what we see is a vision, how much is magic, how much is reality?
-the way that they deglamorize the monster-hunting profession. Keeping the balance is a sucky, sucky, sucky job. Maybe it's better if you don't live in Russia in the rainy season, but I can't imagine it'd be that much better.
-the animated fairy tale sequence. Very cool, and nicely transitioned to with the drawings of the boss guy.
-the attention to complexity and gray-area in the battle between good and evil. It didn't feel hammed up at all, it felt very honest and sad. Few movies succeed at making me feel anything for vampire/demon characters, but this one actually did. I felt for his neighbor, and a part of my heart did break for the line "They were in love. Maybe they wanted to be immortal together." And then with the vampire girl's accusation to Anton and the others about bait and "Where were you when he bit into me like food? I loved him. Why shouldn't I eat the boy?" That part was so interesting to me also because Anton felt for her misery, you could see he felt it deeply and had asked himself and his superiors the same questions, but at the same time he was completely ready to kill her. The actor did a great job of building that dichotomy: Anton is a killer, even though he doesn't want to be, even though he wants to think he's not so close to being like them.
Then again I could watch the movie a second time and have a completely different reading of his character. It was a very layered performance.
FINAL VERDICT: A-. Top quality fantasy/horror film, one of the best I've seen in a long time (probably the best I've seen since LOTR). It's weird, it's dark, it's visually arresting and it's foreign. It's creepy and I want the sequel very badly. I also want fanfic. I'm regretting not taking Russian in college because I'm not going to find much fanfic, I can tell.
((This movie also reminded me a bit of the original Highlander film. The very first one. With all the romanticism sucked out.))
