Review of Day Watch (2006) by Ken T — 13 Sep 2008

What happened?

Night Watch was a blast of a film being liken to The Matrix with mythical beasts and magic instead of technology and backed up with a heavy metal soundtrack. It also helped that the plot was quite simple and was backed by interesting characters.

So what's the problem here?

Well, the style of the film hasn't changed.

The characters are pretty much the same as before. The effects are as before. The music is as before.

But...

It just isn't as good as the first film. It starts of with promise with the telling of the story of the Chalk but when it reverts back to the present day, it gets lost in random scenes/events that don't move the story along. You get the feeling that a lot of it was to do with trying to make a scene look cool and that they'll make it fit in with the story later. There is also lots of things that happens that don't get explained and things that just don't add up. In the first film, the different Others, while they have powers, are still bound by very human frailties. Here though, they seem to have even more powers and are able to do even more things but are taken down by the smallest of things for no reason.

In a lot of cases, we are just told things and that was it.

Part of that is probably down to this being based on a book that also happens to be from a series of three and so there is always going to be bits that are cut from the story that would've explained it all properly. That is also probaly why the first film works better because in having to tell the origin of the characters and set the scene of the film, it has better structure and it flows better.

Here though, the film just seems to wander along until it gets to some sort of finale that turns out to be a bit of a let down.