Review: Night Watch (Movie)
Oct. 25th, 2008 09:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
4thofelevenAnother week, another movie that manages to eliminate most of the depth of its source material…
Now, don’t get me wrong – Night Watch isn’t anywhere near as bad an adaptation of the Lukyanenko novel as Max Payne was of the game – but it occurs to me that they do share on thing; where both films fail is where they remove much of the mystery-solving aspect of their source material. The Night Watch stories all feature lots of clues as to what’s really going on, and tend to stand up well to re-reading, once you know who’s really pulling the strings and to what end in each one. The film manages a fairly faithful adaptation of the basic story, but leaves out most of the clues and subtle touches. So most of the original story is there, but the original ending no longer works – because all of the events that it was depending on don’t happen in the film.
Now granted, the film does a fairly decent job working in its own subplot to support its ending (including borrowing and repurposing a scene from Day Watch). Still, I think a fair amount of what was unique in the novel’s setting is lost; the film’s Zabulon and Gesar aren’t the Machiavellian plotters of the novel – Zabulon seems a fairly unimaginative thug, while Gesar seems several steps behind the Dark Others. The idea that the Night Watch uses essentially the same tactics and strategies as the Day Watch is absent entirely. In general, the film seems to want a more straightforward ‘looming showdown between good and evil’, whereas the novel depicts a rather stable cold war, with each side grudgingly recognising the need to accommodate the other. Part of this is terminology – the novel refers to the agreement between Light and Dark Others as a ‘treaty’, whereas the film considers it only a ‘truce’ -I have no idea if this difference exists in the Russian originals, but it certainly gives things a different flavour in the translations…
It’s a shame, because absent those elements, there’s not a lot I find interesting about the Night Watch setting; most of the fun lies in unravelling the schemes of the two watches, and seeing a setting where Light and Dark hold each other in check through bureaucratic technicalities. On its own, the film really didn’t strike me as having anything special in its setting; there’s nothing here that would recommend the novels to me…
Now, don’t get me wrong – Night Watch isn’t anywhere near as bad an adaptation of the Lukyanenko novel as Max Payne was of the game – but it occurs to me that they do share on thing; where both films fail is where they remove much of the mystery-solving aspect of their source material. The Night Watch stories all feature lots of clues as to what’s really going on, and tend to stand up well to re-reading, once you know who’s really pulling the strings and to what end in each one. The film manages a fairly faithful adaptation of the basic story, but leaves out most of the clues and subtle touches. So most of the original story is there, but the original ending no longer works – because all of the events that it was depending on don’t happen in the film.
Now granted, the film does a fairly decent job working in its own subplot to support its ending (including borrowing and repurposing a scene from Day Watch). Still, I think a fair amount of what was unique in the novel’s setting is lost; the film’s Zabulon and Gesar aren’t the Machiavellian plotters of the novel – Zabulon seems a fairly unimaginative thug, while Gesar seems several steps behind the Dark Others. The idea that the Night Watch uses essentially the same tactics and strategies as the Day Watch is absent entirely. In general, the film seems to want a more straightforward ‘looming showdown between good and evil’, whereas the novel depicts a rather stable cold war, with each side grudgingly recognising the need to accommodate the other. Part of this is terminology – the novel refers to the agreement between Light and Dark Others as a ‘treaty’, whereas the film considers it only a ‘truce’ -I have no idea if this difference exists in the Russian originals, but it certainly gives things a different flavour in the translations…
It’s a shame, because absent those elements, there’s not a lot I find interesting about the Night Watch setting; most of the fun lies in unravelling the schemes of the two watches, and seeing a setting where Light and Dark hold each other in check through bureaucratic technicalities. On its own, the film really didn’t strike me as having anything special in its setting; there’s nothing here that would recommend the novels to me…