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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Day Watch

02:19 / 12.02.06

Sequel to Night Watch, and something that we should have more info on shortly. It's been strangely hard to find out much about it though, so I'm hoping that this thread will help a little bit with willing some type of info into existence.

If anyone knows when the film is actually coming out in the UK or US, then please post in here. I'd rather know about the UK release date, but if we know when it's out in the US, then we might find out about the UK date around the same time.

14:02 / 12.02.06

I looked about on the net, and the movie is already playing in russia!

Maybe it´ll be like last year: previews in summer, regular release in autumn.

trailer link

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

16:02 / 18.02.06

I'm anxiously awaiting Night Watch here in the States. The anticipation is killing me.

Oh, the horror geek in me knows no bounds...

03:45 / 07.03.06

Just caught Night Watch tonight at a free screening. So it should be in theaters soon, right?

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

18:46 / 07.03.06

We finally got it here at the ass end of shitty cities. I'm going to watch it tomorrow on my day off.

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

21:05 / 14.03.06

I finally saw it. I thought it was really fantastic.

It did something that nary a movie has in a long time: made me hopeful. I fell in love with the storyline--I'm anxiously awaiting an English translation of the books--and the obvious adoration the filmmakers placed into making this film. It proved that you can have BOTH: a fascinating storyline and a well-made film (except for the weird video game bit towards the end).

I highly recommend it. I left the theater thinking about it for the rest of the day, most of the night.

I can't wait for "Day Watch."

08:07 / 15.03.06

The first book is nice [the other two volumes haven´t been translated here yet]. The movie covers only about 1/3 of the book!

Kali, Queen of Kitteh

17:58 / 20.03.06

I read about that over in Wikipedia. Nonetheless, I did find the film particularly good.

21:04 / 16.02.07

Woohoo! I saw Dnevnoy dozor [Day Watch] tonight at the Berlinale festival!

This movie is fantastic, at least as good as the last one. The characters of both sides were very believable and got you to care for them. Very impressive action (especially at the end those effects were almost over the top); the humour was used very well, not slapstick or tongue-in-cheek, it lightened the mood instead and gave the atmosphere a more down to earth feel. Which was very necessary, since we´re dealing with vampires, witches, timetravel, magic items and the apocalypse here.

SPOILERS

Again, they mixed stories from the books, and deviated big time from the printed story.
They used the stories with the magic chalk and Geser´s girlfriend and Anton changing their bodies.
Again, the story was mainly about Anton, especially his budding relationship with Svetlana, the extraordinary witch-to-be, and his son. They are the big trumps of the day and the night side, and some very intricate schemes are put into motion on both sides to finally decide the stalemate/battle between those two opposing forces.
A character, that dies in the third novel, also plays a very important and different part, so I have no idea, what the third movie could possibly be about.

SPOILERS END

After the lights came on, the director (Timur Bekmambetov), and the actor of Anton (Konstantin Khabensky) entered the stage, along with two producers (also supposedly the boss of Fox was there), and said some short and sweet things (director: in Russia we say, it´s important how you get treated on your second visit, and from your reactions we can tell, you are very pleased with our movie; "Anton": All I can say, I did on the screen, and all the director can say, he did on the screen).
Then one of the producers was responsible for some hearty laughter, when he said the movie is not just about fantasy, but also depicts the real life of people in Moscow.

Conclusion:
Movies like this make me wonder, what Hollywood is doing with all that money, they waste on Epic Movie, Norshit etc. The budget for Dnevnoy dozor was $4,200,000 according to imdb, and they must have used every dollar at least twenty times. Now I´m really pumped for the fourth novel (released here in three months, yay)!

Our Lady Has Left the Building

09:44 / 17.02.07

Hmmm, are these novels available in English translation?

It explains some of the oddness I felt about it when I watched the film in December. I was really impressed with the visual style and how the captions were integrated into the action. I'm looking forward to the second film.

12:27 / 17.02.07

Hmmm, are these novels available in English translation?

The first two novels have been published (link), the third will be published this summer.

13:29 / 17.02.07

WOO! I'm excited to see. I luv'd Night Watch.

09:05 / 18.02.07

Yeah, Night Watch came out here AGES ago, and I absolutely loved it. The interesting use of subtitles helped a lot I thought, and though it seemed like a fairly obvious thing to do, I can't think of any other movies I've seen that did a similar thing.

Really looking forward to Day Watch - I hope that enough people went out and saw Night Watch at the cinemas in Australia that we get a timely release.

21:29 / 18.02.07

a fascinating storyline and a well-made film (except for the weird video game bit towards the end).

Yeah, I don't know what the deal was with that. It's the kind of thing we saw a lot of in American movies in the early-to-mid nineties and it was awful then even though it had novelty value.

20:21 / 15.04.07

....and about 3000 years later, we have a release date!

Trailer (haha, check the car bit at the end.)

Site

US is June 1st, with the UK getting it sometime in October as far as I remember.

Essential Dazzler

20:29 / 15.04.07

I had a feeling it'd see release towards the end of this year, and was OK with that........... until I saw that trailer! Ugh, not being able to see it Physically hurts

20:57 / 15.04.07

Uh......

It's probably time I watched Night Watch then.

11:16 / 25.09.07

This is apparently being released in Britain on October 5th in cinemas, and in America on DVD on October 31st. (Keep comments on 'canny marketing' out of it.)

There is now a thread on the series of books, also, as they are translated and released in Britain.

Happy Dave Has Left

14:46 / 25.09.07

I'm seriously excited about this - I ran across Night Watch almost by accident when it turned up briefly in my pay-per-view movie service, and loved it. It turned me on to Russian cinema in a big way, and this looks even better. I'm trying to steer clear of referencing The Matrix in terms of expectation-bending new precedents in film, so I'll reference something else instead - this makes me thing of City of God (Cidade De Deus)- a frenetic, original and groundbreaking film that mixes Western influences with unique elements from the country of origin. For City of God it was the post-Tarantino fragmented storyline, smash cuts and visual tics like overhead shots of apartments, all mushed together with a gorgeous soundtrack, local actors and superb dialogue, and with Nightwatch and now Daywatch it's bullet time, guns n' explosions n' startling visual effects mixed with a cracking original story and black humour that strikes me as very Russian indeed.

Can't wait!

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

15:16 / 25.09.07

I'm really interested to see what the plot entails, given that Night Watch not only utilised only the first third of the novel, but changed the ending somewhat... a straight adaptation of Day Watch therefore wouldn't work, continuity-wise.

I'm hoping at least some of the Day Watch novel will make it to the screen, as I really enjoyed that, but I'm not too bothered if it goes off at a completely different tangent if its as good as the first movie was.

16:50 / 25.09.07

HQ - for further experiences in Russian Cinema, can I recommend Burnt by the Sun and Mirror?

Stoatie - as far as I am aware, the Day Watch film works with the second half of the Night Watch book rather than the Day Watch book. There's some explanation on the Wikipedia article, but it's loaded with spoilers for the film, so you may want to avoid it for the moment... But you probably already knew this.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

18:28 / 25.09.07

Cheers, F... I kind of guessed it would be on Wikipedia, but figured there'd be spoilers. Hmm. Wonder if they'll ever do a film covering the first story in Day Watch, because that was probably my favourite so far, even though the "doomed romance" thing's been done to death.

but you forgot Stalker when you were talking about Russian cinema... one of the best movies EVER.

19:16 / 25.09.07

There is that. Co-incidentally, I'm reading Roadside Picnic at the moment. I thought I'd see Stalker once I had finished, having not seen it yet, and thus not feeling confident recommending it.

Is there room in this thread for a discussion of Night Watch and Day Watch as emblematic of the effect of big-budget, 'hollywood style' filmmaking on Russian or international film? Or is that more for another thread? The transition of style is not necessarily a bad thing, but it's certainly happening...

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

20:38 / 25.09.07

There is that. Co-incidentally, I'm reading Roadside Picnic at the moment. I thought I'd see Stalker once I had finished, having not seen it yet, and thus not feeling confident recommending it.

There's a huge amount of difference between the two- like EVERYTHING except the basic idea. Though the Strugatskys did write the screenplay for the movie as well as the novel. Apparently they also wrote a novel called Stalker which was the novelisation of the movie, but I don't think you can get it in English. I'd fucking love to read that, though. (Roadside Picnic is, coincidentally, in my top five SF novels too- I read it when I was about 15 and loved it, and have only recently been able to read it again, what with it having been out of print for ages. And S.T.A.L.K.E.R. the game, which officially has nothing to do with either but is heavily indebted to both, is one of my top games of the year. There's just something about that idea that really gets me. Hmm. Maybe I should wait for you to finish the book and start a Roadside Picnic thread in Books. You'd join in, yeah?)

WHOAH. HUGE off-topic thang. Sorry, guys.

19:18 / 28.11.07

Having seen Daywatch now, I'm a bit confused on if they are still planning a trilogy. Without spoilage what I mean is, the plot elements in Daywatch were wrapped up in such a way as to not require anything further. Nightwatch was clearly setup to lead into Daywatch, but there's nowhere to go from here. So I wonder if they decided to chop it back down to two movies instead, or are taking a completely different take for the third.

This was a lot of fun. Good use of effects in the end scenes, too. Though I felt there was a lot of unnecessary digression that while fun could have been cut, and am always annoyed by this sort of ending. It always feels like a bit of a cop out to me. But I admit it was done well. Certainly worth a view if you liked the first one.

19:41 / 28.11.07

Yeah, I just saw it last night and was wondering the same thing. Where do you go from that ending? What can you do that doesn't irredeemably screw up what you've already done?

I was reminded of a variant something grant said in another thread—if American fantasy is about SFX and British fantasy is about acting, then Russian fantasy is about locations. And so it is here; those crappy apartments with the horrible flocked wallpaper, the architecture of the cityscapes with the old Soviet Brutalism hard by the tackiest gaud of nouveau-riche cpaitalism, the squalid shitty crampedness of even the "nicer" places.

While the films are interesting as fantasy, they are FUCKING TERRIFIC as a window into the mood and tenor of post-Soviet Russia.

STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK

00:20 / 17.02.08

Yes. What the last two posts said. I finally got round to watching this, and I'm DRUNK AS ALL HELL, so I'll have to keep it to the basic observation that I loved it to fuckin' pieces, and I think they've written themselves out of a trilogy.

Which is KIND of a shame, really, but maybe quit while you're ahead is a GOOD thing?

There's a lot more to be said, either here or in the Books thread, about how the cosmology of these (probably more books than movies, given the finale here) is SO the "anti-Matrix"- there are, indeed, other worlds than these, but your responsibility lies with this one, and you can't get away with causing a 50-car pile-up in it just because the people involved aren't "enlightened" enough to have access to the others... they're still as dead...

I'm still sad they didn't do the first story from the book "Day Watch", really, though thinking about it it wouldn't be much of an action movie.

All told, I loved it. Was a LITTLE baffled by the doll-head Doom 3 spider thing, but, y'know, they were crazy times.