Manichean fantasy made in Russia (by Timur Bekmambetov) but infused with a universal underground-comic sensibility. It may therefore please the proponents of homogeneity. A long prologue in a generic Dark Age (with narration in English before the subtitles take over) lays out the background of "the eternal war, light against dark," in addition to the rules of the truce under which the opposing forces have coexisted to the present day, with the soliders of the light marshalled into a Nightwatch and conversely the soldiers of the dark into a Daywatch, to stand guard against each other. The advent, or resurrection or reincarnation or whatever, of the Virgin of Byzantium will herald the Final Battle, the balance of which will be tipped by the choice of allegiance of the Great Other, whoever that may be. In spite of a not very lucid narrative, it's pretty hard to miss the Virgin of Byzantium, because she walks around under an enormous Vortex aswarm with crows or ravens or whatever. The hero, with whom we became acquainted in a second lengthy prologue set twelve years in the past, is not the Great Other but merely an Other, a precognitive soldier of the light ("Just what we need, another asshole with visions of the future") who, like that other comic-book hero, Blade, strives to keep vampires in line without, unlike Blade, killing them and thereby disturbing the balance. When he kills one inadvertently (the head cracking in two like a ceramic pot, one of countless competent special effects), the balance never recovers clear through to the climactic revelation of the Great Other. Our knowledge that this is but the first part of a projected trilogy is an added burden. An added imbalance. Konstantin Khabensky, Vladimir Menshov, Valery Zolotukhin, Maria Poroshina. (2005) — Duncan Shepherd
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