Vampires Aren't People Too

I managed to catch the late show of "Night Watch" at the Ken Theater in Kensington. Here is how the Landmark Theatre guide describes it:

"For centuries, undercover members of the Night Watch have policed the world's Dark Ones - the vampires, witches, shape-shifters and sorcerors that wage treachery in the night - while the Dark Ones have a Day Watch to police the forces of the Light. The fate of humanity rests in this delicate balance between good and evil, but that fate is in jeopardy...Set in contemporary Moscow, this horror-fantasy is the biggest grossing film in post-Soviet history and the first of a trilogy bast on the best-selling sci-fi novels of Sergei Lukyanenko."

My reading and writing in Russian is improving, but I'm still frustrated with my limited ability to understand spoken Russian. Nevertheless, I was able to pick up some interesting contrasts between the subtitles and this movie's Russian dialogue. For example, according to the subtitles, the film's conflict involves "Others" (these supernatural types) and "humans". According to the dialogue, the conflict involves the supernatural types and "people".

I missed the exact Russian phrasing, but one of my favorite subtitles was for a scene in which one vampire was shouting at another vampire to finish off their victim before Night Watch arrived: "Drink him! Drink him!"

I was pleased that I at least didn't need the subtitles to understand the guy in a car trying to pick up a vampire girl walking on the street by calling out his window the Russian equivalent of "Hey baby! Hey baby!" The manner by which this minor character became a vampire was that when she was a human (that is, a "person") she and a vampire fell in love, and in order for her to become a vampire, the Dark Ones had to get a permit issued to them from Night Watch. Soviet Russia ahoy!

My favorite scenes in the movie featured the Night Watch emergency response truck. It resembles a jet-powered U-Haul, completely inefficient aerodynamically, but with flames shooting out from underneath it nevertheless. In one sequence the truck has to get from one side of Moscow to the other in less than a minute and the drivers don't know the exact address they're looking for. I think the scenes with the truck darting in and out of traffic at super high speeds, driving on the wrong side of the street, was a Russian in-joke since, by all accounts, the street traffic in Moscow is a circle in Hell.