Jeremiah Hoyet

Recently my family rented a movie we had seen previews for while watching another film. The movie was Day Watch, which is toated to be more action packed than the Matrix. While the movie was good, it left me with a sour feeling in my stomach that I was missing something.

It turns out that Day Watch is the sequel, or rather the continuation, of another movie titled “Night Watch“. While watching Day Watch, there were references to past events and characters that you didn’t immediately understand. This caused the plot of the movie to become quite hard to follow. It also led to a lot of “WTF” moments, like when you see the son of the main character housing with the “Dark Others”, when he is a “Light Other”.

Once I had looked up more information about the film and found out that it was actually a sequel, my dad and I decided to go rent the first movie and watch them back to back.

Watching the first movie in a set of films after having seen later films from that series is always full of “Ah Ha!” moments. Like in Night Watch, you learn more about the special abilities of the characters and why the son of the main character is housing with the enemy. In short, you can’t watch Day Watch without first having viewed Night Watch, in my opinion. Once the first movie had played out, we watched the second movie again, but this time with the back-story fresh in our minds, making the movie seem much better than it had the first time around.

After it was all said and done, this isn’t the best set of films in the world, but it’s a damn good watch. The special effects are outstanding, and the story line, while not perfect or always what you would expect, is actually pretty decent. The only real downside to the film is the feeling that you’re watching an old Godzilla movie, because the film was originally in Russian and dubbed in English.