Tuesday, July 10, 2007

Daywatch (2006)

R: This is a pretty good movie. It's not going to change your life, but it's better than most of the action movies out there. Unfortunately, if you don't speak Russian, you're not going to know this, because our friends at Fox have significantly changed the script. And they've done it all through the magic of subtitles.

The thing that sets this apart from, I dunno, Blade, is that the tone is a bit more philosophical. Again, it's not Bergman, but it's quite thoughtful, if not brilliant. The problem that Daywatch (and Nightwatch before it) have is that they're complicated. Major plot points might be revealed in an aside, and those plot points can be pretty weird. My guess is that Russian audiences are willing to work a little harder to follow these things, though I can't be sure. Fox has Americanized the movie by converting all of those musings on light and dark into clunky plot exposition. Working from memory, there are a lot of changes like:

"Zavulon: Yegor, we've chosen the Dark because it lets us hide our
inadequacies -- you can hide them with hate, or lust, or whatever you
please. There's nothing more human than these inadequacies."

becomes

"Zavulon: Yegor, don't forget, you're a Great Dark Other. If you meet the
Great Light Other, it will be the apocalypse!"

If I find a fansub somewhere that's more accurate, I'll mention it here.

1 Comments:

At 11:52 AM, Blogger RossAndKate said...

K: This is really disappointing to me. I really wanted to see this, but now I'm going to have to wait until someone goes to the trouble of creating a translation! What a crock.

 

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