'Twilight Watch' Now 'Dusk Watch,' and Getting Underway
Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Remakes and Sequels
Any fans of the Russian Watch (Dozor) franchise out there? Anyone? Drat. Smash hits in their home country, Night Watch and Day Watch have barely blipped on the U.S. box-office radar, with the second film failing to crack $500 grand stateside. Their failure to catch on isn't really surprising -- we like fantasy, but maybe not fantasy this goofy, surreal, and (sometimes) downright abstract. And the movies are really more about Russia than an epic battle between the forces of light and dark, anyhow. But the series is making a killing at home, as I say (Day Watch's $34 million take is a Russian record), and director Timur Bekmambetov was presumably hired to direct this summer's very American Wanted on the strength of the Watch films. Having finished frolicking with Angelina Jolie, he's finally revving up the third film in the series. The American title was previously thought to be Twilight Watch, which is what the Sergei Lukyanenko novel is called here, but according to this Screen Daily story, Fox International is going with the snappier Dusk Watch. Bekmambetov is already in preproduction on the film.
I think the movies are confusing, occasionally annoying (The Chalk of Fate? Seriously?), and weird enough to be really interesting. If the plot description (supernatural "Others" representing either the forces of light or the forces of dark hide among us, bound by a centuries-old truce that's about to be broken) sounds interesting to you, they're worth checking out, at least as curiosities.
[hat tip: Aint It Cool News]
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
5-20-2008 @ 9:53AM
Mr. R said...
The movies have a lot of fun things, specially the mid world they fall into with tons of mosquitoes but eventually the drama overtakes the coolness of this elements and it becomes more a soap opera than an action-terror film.
As a cultural phenomenon is worth watching, got hooked in a masochistic way once i started watching, love to hate it.
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5-20-2008 @ 10:07AM
I said...
IMHO, it's pretty simple why they haven't caught on. Boring and predictable. I was really disappointed in the first one and didn't even bother with the second.
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5-20-2008 @ 5:57PM
Eugene Novikov said...
Predictable? Consider a career as a psychic.
5-20-2008 @ 11:04AM
Tim said...
I really loved the first movie (Night Watch). The second movie (Day Watch) was almost as cool. Shortly after seeing Day Watch, I got my hands on an English translation of the Night Watch novel, and I found out two things.
The first thing, surprisingly, is that the majority of the ideas within the first two movies are contained within the first novel. Unsurprisingly, however, the story, especially within the second movie-was changed around - a lot.
A third thing to keep in mind is that all four books in the Night Watch world are composed of, well, interconnected novellas.
I haven't watched the movies since I've read the books, but I do remember that the stories within the book felt a lot more thought out and ended in a much more satisfying manner.
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5-20-2008 @ 11:33AM
Leslie said...
Wasn't there an interview recently where Bekmambetov said that "Wanted" is the third installment in the series?
I swear I remember reading that because I was really confused by it--thinking that the trailers for "Wanted" don't seem to show anything even remotely related to "Night Watch" or "Day Watch."
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5-20-2008 @ 2:59PM
totoro said...
I'm surprised these films weren't more popular here-the trailers were pretty incredible.
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5-21-2008 @ 10:38AM
SM1L3Z said...
dude these movies are awesome thats all there is to it
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