The differences were interesting. At first, I wasn't thinking the changes warranted a special release, but then we started getting characters and full scenes that weren't in the original. Here are some of the bigger changes:
- Anton has visions of the future. In the theatrical release, we see inside his head when he has these visions (like when he's on the subway and sees Sveta for the first time, we see that he has a vision of a plane crashing). In this version, all we see is Anton screaming a lot.
- However, when the data analyst is looking up the weather, he sees a future version of the website and reads that a plane will crash, so this is how we get that information. In the theatrical release, he saw on the weather page that there was a tornado warning. There is only one mention of a tornado warning later in the movie, but there is no real tornado, just the vortext which looks like a tornado of crows.
- We continuously come back to a married couple who are on the plane. These characters were not in the theatrical version. I don't know how necessary it is, but it helps us connect and care about the safty of the plane more.
- Yegor is watching some cartoon show instead of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. I think it makes sense that he's watching Buffy because in the next scene, you can see he's widdled himself a stake.
- Ignat. Ignat is a character in the books that is just as important as Seymon or Tigercub and Bear. He's not in the theatrical release at all. This entire subplot was missing, but they never really wrap it up in the director's cut, so maybe that's why they left it out. Ignat is this magician who seems to make people better just by being near him. Women fall in love with him a lot. In the movie, he's already given up the world of others, planning to get married to a girl, but Seymon practically kidnaps him to make him go woo Sveta and find out who cursed her. This scene is straight out of the book. He attempts to get close to her, but fails. In the movie, he fails because he is thinking about his fiancee. As soon as Sveta finds out he's engaged, we see the plane's power go out. This shows a direct connection between Sveta's mood and the safty of the plane, which we didn't really get without this scene.
- Also, in the grocery store, we see something from the books that isn't in the movie anywhere else: Ignat uses low-level magic to shift a shoplifter's morals slightly in the Light's favor, which is mostly prohibited. I did get a kick out of that the shoplifter was an elderly man stealing grapes instead of some kid.
- The biggest difference is that Anton knows that Yegor is his son right from when he finds out that his ex-wife is his mother. In this version, he had overheard the others saying to the fortune teller "Why did you lie to him. You knew it was his child." So Anton's known for 12 years he has a son? In the theatrical version, he hadn't heard that. He doesn't hear that until watching a video clip on the computer later on in the movie. This makes way more sense because I don't think he would have left Yegor alone if he knew he was his own son and not the son of his ex and her lover.
- The music in the credits was in Russian, but I think it was a song specifically about NightWatch. I could hear the repeated words like "Gorodetsky, vampire, Svetlana, Zabulon, and other character names." I wonder if there's a translation in lyrics somewhere. [edit: yep, here it is.]
- There are other differences, but mostly just the way scenes are cut together.
There was also a making of on this disc that I had not seen before. It's interesting to hear that they were all worried about this film because a lot of people's reputations were on the line. And then it turns out to be a box office smash. Also, it was interesting that so many actors took the good/evil thing so seriously. Daria actually said that if her character was a fraud fortune teller, she'd do it, but if she was a real one, she wouldn't do it because what if she says these magic words and something really did happen in real life? And the reason they picked Zhanna to play Alica, the evil girl, was because she wasn't an actress, but a pop star, someone who is a "seductress of the masses" so she could play evil and not have to worry about it. What a strange thing to say! And I didn't know this was her first acting gig. She gives an awesome performance in DayWatch.
Come on, you know this trailer is awesome:
No comments:
Post a Comment