Night Watch
Mar. 6th, 2006 10:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
featherynscaleAlso, we took the opportunity on Saturday to go see Night Watch up at the Tivoli. (Now that someone has bothered to tell me that there's an elevator in the building, and that I don't actually have to haul myself hand over hand up a gazillion narrow stairs when my knee is acting up in order to get to the theaters, I like the Tivoli even better than I did before.)
While there were a number of things that would have made the film much better, chief among them being a connection between the two plots of the film (those being a. A cursed virgin threatens to end the world and b. A child is born who is prophecied to decide the fate of the world, Light or Dark, forever) and a satisfying resolution to plot a, it was a lot of fun, and certainly the most original vampire film I've seen in a damned long time.
The film is also, notably, packed full of Very Cool Film Tricks and Non-Plot Devices which are more or less passed over without drawing attention to them. One of the most interesting things I saw was a scene in which the Night Watch (who are supposed to be the Good Guys) are in an apartment building across the street from the apartment building which is the site of immenant Armageddon. They have taken over the building in a frozen-in-time moment, and its normal inhabitants are sitting at the dinner table. During this entire scene, the "normal" people are frozen, and the Night Watch move around them. Then, we see the window, out of which they observe the gathering Doom. In the window is a collection of clutter and junk, arranged as to create a sigil which they are apparently using to collect occult data. They move these bits around, an AOL cd, a broken doll, some cigarette package ends, and so on, and are extracting something from it. Exactly how it works is never mentioned. But the fact that this stuff exists lends something to the scene, making it somehow better and realer than it might have been if there were some more obvious and traditional occultism going on.
Also, the folks who subtitled the film for English somehow managed to make a fair number of the subtitles an integrated part of the film. When the characters get angry and yell, the subtitles get larger or fly across the screen and shatter. It's a cheap trick, but used to very good effect.
Good times, overall. Worth seeing, even if it likely does lose something in translation.
While there were a number of things that would have made the film much better, chief among them being a connection between the two plots of the film (those being a. A cursed virgin threatens to end the world and b. A child is born who is prophecied to decide the fate of the world, Light or Dark, forever) and a satisfying resolution to plot a, it was a lot of fun, and certainly the most original vampire film I've seen in a damned long time.
The film is also, notably, packed full of Very Cool Film Tricks and Non-Plot Devices which are more or less passed over without drawing attention to them. One of the most interesting things I saw was a scene in which the Night Watch (who are supposed to be the Good Guys) are in an apartment building across the street from the apartment building which is the site of immenant Armageddon. They have taken over the building in a frozen-in-time moment, and its normal inhabitants are sitting at the dinner table. During this entire scene, the "normal" people are frozen, and the Night Watch move around them. Then, we see the window, out of which they observe the gathering Doom. In the window is a collection of clutter and junk, arranged as to create a sigil which they are apparently using to collect occult data. They move these bits around, an AOL cd, a broken doll, some cigarette package ends, and so on, and are extracting something from it. Exactly how it works is never mentioned. But the fact that this stuff exists lends something to the scene, making it somehow better and realer than it might have been if there were some more obvious and traditional occultism going on.
Also, the folks who subtitled the film for English somehow managed to make a fair number of the subtitles an integrated part of the film. When the characters get angry and yell, the subtitles get larger or fly across the screen and shatter. It's a cheap trick, but used to very good effect.
Good times, overall. Worth seeing, even if it likely does lose something in translation.
