Timur Bekmambetov's Night Watch, based on the novel by Sergei Lukianenko, is an interesting movie. It begins in the past, where we witness epic battles between the forces of good and evil, which ends in a stalemate at which point the two sides declare a truce. A group called The Night Watch is formed and they serve as agents of the light side who make sure that the forces of darkness abide by the truce and don't break the rules. Night Watch agents are invisible to all humans, save for a select group known as 'others' who have senses beyond what normal men and woman have. When one of the 'others' awakens and becomes conscious of the eternal struggle going on around them, they are more often than not drawn to either the light side or the dark side. The forces of darkness also have their own group of enforcers, The Day Watch, who serve as a counterpart to The Night Watch. Got all that? Good.

Cut to sometime in the early to mid nineties and we meet a man named Anton Gorodetsky who meets up with a witch in hopes of getting his girlfriend back. It seems she's left him because she's pregnant, the child she is carrying sired by someone other than himself. As the witch starts going through her rites, the ceremony is broken up by Night Watch agents who bring her in for practicing magic. They're surprised when Anton talks to them – if he can see them, he must be one of the 'others.' Fast forward twelve years to the present day and Anton is now working for Night Watch. He's tasked with tracking down a little boy he is being called to by a vampire and his girlfriend (who he has recently turned). Anton follows the boy to the vampire's lair where he accidentally kills the male bloodsucker while saving the boy's life. This breaks the truce in that Night Watch agents are not allowed to kill and as such, the forces of darkness get a little ticked off at him. Regardless, Anton continues his watch of the boy, whose name is Yegor, and gets to know him as well as the ties that he has to his own past while defending him from the dead vampire's girlfriend who still hungers for a taste of the boy's blood.

While all of this is going on, a woman named Svetlana appears to have been infected with some sort of curse. Anton alerts Night Watch to this when he mistakes her for a witch on the subway, tipped off by the vortex, which appears around her. This vortex could very well spell the end of the world as we know it, or at least as mankind in the film knows it, and so Night Watch has to put a stop to Svetlana, who isn't even sure what all is happening to her.

The first fifteen minutes or so of Night Watch are a little tough to follow if you don't pay really close attention. A whole lot happens very quickly and if you sneeze, you're liable to miss an important point of the initial set up and if you should be so unfortunate, it's likely that later parts of the film will make no sense. Once the set up is over with and things calm down a little bit, the movie starts to become more clear and the plot begins to shape up nicely but even when that does happen there's still a whole lot going on in this film. The pacing of the movie is a little strange – it starts off with a bang as we witness the fantastic beginning battle scene but once it jumps to the present things get a little more odd in terms of how they play out. At two hours, there are parts of the film that could have been tightened up a bit.

Even with some of the pacing problems, however, there's enough that the movie gets right to make this one worth a look. You'll have to turn off the logical portion of your brain and try to look past some typically bad CGI effects to enjoy the movie but if you're able to do that and don't mind the fact that sometimes the movie is just flat out weird, there's a pretty interesting story to be told. There are a few too many spots where the style overshadows the substance but by the end of the movie we can at least care for Yegor and root for Anton as he and his owl-turned-into-a-hot-chick partner, Olga, rush to save the day. The fantasy elements might be too much for some more jaded viewers but if you're able to throw realism out the door and enjoy the film for what it is, it's enjoyable enough.

Video:

Fox's 1.85.1 transfer of Night Watch is pretty sharp. As mentioned, this is a highly stylized film and the visuals are all over the place, running the gamut between really light scenes and exceptionally dark scenes with plenty of effects work and an over abundance of CGI work thrown into the mix seemingly every few minutes or so. As such, this could have been a tricky disc to author but thankfully the picture here is quite strong. Color reproduction is very good and black levels stay strong and deep throughout. There aren't any problems with mpeg compression artifacts and only some minor edge enhancement rears its ugly head if you look for it. Aliasing and shimmering is present but kept to a minimum, thankfully. Skin tones look good, and there's a surprisingly good level of detail present in both the foreground and the background of the image, which rarely gets muddied up in the shadows or darker sequences. All in all, a solid job by Fox in the visuals department.