Baby Gods

I just watched Day Watch on DVD - the sequel to Night Watch.

I really enjoyed it - either a massive budget increase since the first film or special effects have really come down in price.

Night Watch seemed to have a well used and  relatively low budget. The story of a young man, framed into joining the ‘Night Watch’ monitoring the legal and illegal activities of the ‘dark ones’ and then fighting to retain a relationship which his son.

The Day Watch picks up where the preceding film left off and we see the continuing fight of light trying to suppress the activities of the dark with the dark constantly trying to find some way to offset the balance and attain the upper hand.

Day Watch got a little confusing in places but some high enjoyable set pieces.

I love action films with subtitles. I only really appreciate Jackie Chan when he has subtitles at his feet and because these films come from Russia we get to enjoy hearing emotive language that we don’t understand and read the subtitles beneath. All of which helps reinforce the notion that we watch a battle between 2 ‘other’ races engaged in a struggle we can’t understand and talking in a language that we can’t comprehend.

I’d love to recommend Day Watch in isolation since it has better production values but you really need to watch the two films in sequence.

During the course of writing this blog post up I discovered that a trilogy of books by Sergei Lukyanenko formed as the basis for the films. So either a 3rd film called Twilight Watch requires approval and filming. Or I have to read the novels to find out what could happen next.

I suspect I will do both.