Night Watch

Night Watch

Night Watch

Sounds like the Russian film industry is trying to sell this one as "Hollywood beater", but one look at the directing, camera and acting work plus location selection and lighting will reveal this as a "Hollywood C movie beater". The plot is an awful Underworld ripoff and the best scene in the whole movie is the beginning which is just a ripoff of LOTR camera runs and a Highlander bad guy lookalike. If nothing more original comes from Russia, they might as well keep trash like this non-dubbed (hearing gibberish which nobody understands while trying to follow a plot that no-one aside the script writer cares about is bad enough - and add to that the substandard filming and we've got a nominee for the worst film of 2005). 1/10 - avoid (I mean, Van Helsing was better than this crap). P.S. This is a "non-Russian" Euro opinion - so no "US / Russia" politics involved.

The "Ivan" refers to "Night Watch" being Russian, the "terrible" refers to its quality. It's as if the scriptwriter and editor never saw a film before as the scenes seems to hit the screen in completely random ways. I tend to imagine a chimps sitting in the edit room. They obviously put a lot into the cinematography, but not into developing a coherent story. I hear that the occult is popular in Russia (as religion was suppressed all those years), but I don't see how this film could be the 2nd biggest of all time. Is this the same Russsia that brought us "Come and See" and all those Eisenstein films? True that was another era. The question isn't how can you make head or tail of the story, the question is why would you want to bother to try?

I just finished to look the movie and I should say it was very very exciting. The story is interesting, the actors play very good and there are a lot of special effects and actions. So I can everybody advice to see the film. The movie is a large milestone in the Russian movie industry. You can already see that budget of the film is much bigger as of other Russian movies, so I think in the next time we will see a lot of such good and expensive films. I look forward for the second part. May be if I have enough time I will buy a book to read it in original. Enjoy the movie

I have been much skeptical about this film before it was released and didn't changed my mind even when it became a successful hit here. Recently I bought it only out of curiosity and I was completely right with all my fears. It was terrible. Based on a first book of local lackluster fantasy trilogy Night Watch has borrowed the worst from Hollywood action movies. Silly story, bad storytelling, poor acting and over the top ugly violence - all that was in this Russian blockbuster If you add to that bad cinematography and terrible sound (most likely due to lack of money) you get a perfect example how not to make a good film. With unexampled advertising and marketing campaign this film was able to make profits but don't let all those buzz to mislead you. At least you must know what movie you're going to watch. You've been warned. If you're looking for good Russian movies skip this one. 3 out of 10

I liked this movie very much a new twist on the vampire lore coming out of Russia,but I feel the movie missed some key plot points and poor character development, the scene with the witch at the beginning actually does not take place until the second book, and Antons neighbour was an integral part of the book and he hardly gets mentioned in the movie, Olga is the same there was so much more to her then the movie depicts. I know that books are usually better then the movie but in this case they skipped whole chapters and mixed up the order in other cases, I am still going to watch part two "The Day Watch" and I truly hope they stay closer to the book in this one.

"Nochnoi Dozor" (called "Night Watch" in English) is the sort of movie that one would almost expect to come from Hollywood, but it didn't. This new-fangled Russian export tells the story of a negotiation between the Dark forces and Light forces - both evil - to police each other, so to speak. They couldn't defeat each other because they were equally powerful, so addition to either side would sway things. There is now a boy who can sway things. I think that what this movie is saying overall is that both sides are really the same. But the boy does what he does because the Light forces are basically hypocrites; the Dark forces at least admit that they're evil. I'm eager to see how they continue the story in the 2nd and 3rd installments. Oh, and by the way: August 19, 1992 is the first anniversary of the coup that toppled Gorbachev. We'll have to see whether that plays any part in the continuation.

An unfortunate and more or less insignificant movie with poor camera work, endless fast-forwards, shaking cameras, never ending jumps, skips and rattles for no obvious reasons, probably to make you more involved; but all you have is just nasty feeling of being kind of sick in your stomach. This is because its simply so horrible that you can forget trying to make yourself look intelligent and media literate by ripping the bladder evacuate because the scale of misguided conception baffles the mind and eventually shuts it down. The book was good, but tasteless director has ruined the experience and the ride which was suppose to happen. DO NOT watch this movie alone or you will lose your mind trying to figure out why anyone would make a movie this bad...