Format: DVD from personal collection on basement television
I have complained in the past about the fact that a lot of anime don’t have a great deal of exposition. I felt exactly the same way with Night Watch (also known as Nochnoy Dozor or Ночноы дозор if you prefer the Cyrillic), which is Russian and not Japanese. Night Watch is based on a novel, which is actually kind of reassuring. The problem with the movie is that it wants desperately to fit all of the material from the book in regardless of whether or not it has time to really help the audience understand it. A hell of a lot of concepts come flying out here right at the start and they aren’t fully explained except through a sort of osmosis.
So where do I start here? The basic premise of the movie is that there are forces of good and forces of evil in the world known as “Others.” The others are essentially human, but have a variety of powers and abilities like vampirism or being able to see future events. The “Light Others,” who are the good guys and the “Dark Others,” who are the bad guys have reached a truce. The truce is enforced by a group called the Night Watch (the good guys watching the bad guys) and a group called the Day Watch (the bad guys watching the good guys).
