Night Watch

HELL YES!!! Ok, now that I have admitted my nerdy unrequited love of the fantasy/scifi genre we can move on. What was most interesting about Night Watch was how it differed from the established fantasy thrillers in cinema, especially the powerhouse Hollywood blockbusters. Most obvious is the fact that, at least in this film, the bad guys win. If there is one true rule of the fantasy genre, it is the good guys have to win. The fantasy genre thrives on the sorts of cultural archetypes that have grown into euphemisms and mentalities in our cultures, the white knight must always triumph over the black knight, etc (admittedly, I don't know a lot about Russian folk tales or myths, so I can't really set up a paradigm for thinking about archetypes in Russian culture). This is why I find the film so interesting, it takes what we think we know about fantasy adventure movies or stories and turns it on its ear.

The "Warriors of light", the good guys in the film, are sneaky bureaucrats who work in the shadows and licence the very evil they seek to destroy, all in the name of balance. It is no surprise that we do not hear one of the night watch espousing the virtue of good over evil, they instead regurgitate the mantra "its our job". It would probably be a little far-stretching to say that the bureaucracy of the night watch and the battle of good and evil is satire for Russia's social situation at the end of the 20th century, but it is not hard to imagine that the film takes on the cultural aspects of the society in which it was created.

Moving on to Anton, the main character, the hero... the white knight. Anton is a semi-violent drunk, who in order to get his wife back tried to murder his unborn child with the help of a witch... frankly if he was not the character most on screen, we would assume him to be the villain. He is in fact the impetus to the breaking of the one true archetypal rule of fantasy film; it is his betrayal of his son that eventually causes the boy to join the warriors of dark and tip the balance in favor of evil. Anton is not completely evil, he does have compassion for people and his recently realized son, its just that his choices have condemned him to be the harbinger of doom.

Ultimately, I liked it, and I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that it did invert the fantasy paradigm. On a minor note, the plot tends to jump at a few points, which is a little characteristic of many Russian films, you have to get used to not being spoon fed the plot. Also, you can definitely see the trend in Russian film to look like it was made ten years prior than its release date. But if you can get past the graphics and plot jumps, its a pretty good movie (but keep in mind that I love that great cinematic milestone and pinnacle of film achievement "Krull").