The otherworld that the Others can enter is translated as the Twilight rather than the Gloom, as the film calls it, and this could be just a difference in translation but I like the novel’s name. That is not in the novel but it is clear, having read the novel, that the scenes were a visual metaphor for the games the Dark and Light play with each other. One thing I did like in the movie was the way the Day Watch tracked future events via the medium of computer games. The heads of Dark and Light are in the book, but in this they are more like area directors of the two Watches. We have the main two stories from the movie, the story of Svetlana’s curse, though there is none of the mystical talk of the Virgin, and the story of Yegor (though his name in this is Egor), the young boy hunted by vampires. He is an analyst for the Night Watch, a backroom boy forced into the field for experience. There is a truce but it has been in place for a much shorter period of time, so the opening of the film with the armies meeting on a bridge in the Middle Ages and fighting to a standstill did not occur.Īnton is the focal character but the entire background of him, not knowing that he is an Other, going to the witch to get his wife back and nearly ordering the occult assassination of his unborn child is not part of this story. However the entire background has changed. The main aspects of the film are there, the Night Watch who represent the Light and monitor the Dark, the Day Watch who represent the Dark and monitor the Light.

It is split into three stories and the first, “Destiny”, is the part of the novel that has been so far translated into film. The book is a revelation, having seen the film first. First published in 1998, it received a second publication in 2004 to tie in with the film and now makes its way to the West. This is the novel which the film Night Watch (2004) was based upon, newly translated from the original Russian.

Night watch lukyanenko novel