A Rough Draft

I know nothing of the books, but shouldn't need to if the script was tight. It was not.

The main character's bizarre obsession with one woman and seemingly effortless adjustment to his new surreal job and surroundings had me rewinding several times, certain I'd missed something that explained what was happening.

I had not.

Also, none of the frequent Russian text displayed on the screen is translated, which is super annoying.

Don't let a few interesting visuals in the previews fool you. The rest are embarrassingly bad.

I like the story-

Kirill (Nikita Volkov) returns home after a work celebration to find someone else living in his apartment. Soon he finds that no one remembers him- Not even the government! He discovers he has been chosen to be a customs agent, a person who can open doors to other worlds.

This movie feels like a rough draft. There was so much touched upon and and crammed into this movie. It would have done well to expand some parts of the storyline. The romance between Kirill and Anna had no depth or resolution. Although there were a few touching moments they weren't long enough to let you care.

Since this was an English dubbed film I must say the voice actors were mediocre. There was a part in the beginning where an actor is speaking and you only hear Kirill reply. Emotion is not always relayed and it takes away from the actors' intention.

There were a couple of neat little action scenes, some special effects and glimpses of other worlds. Scenes with Kirill and Kotya seemed natural.

This has at least inspired me to find the books and have a read.

The main character starts off doing well but things start to go a bit wrong as the plot develops. From the start, a Sci-Fi film is revealed.

There's an annoying blonde in the film who is integral to the story, acting like a nemesis to the main character. She's fairly wooden in acting ability but also needed to counter the 'hero'.

The first half of the film is damn good. Has some decent action, visual effects and a good sense of direction. If the film had stayed on this course, it could've quite easily scored 8 or more as it really entertains.

However, the second part of the film is just odd, muddled, and let's the film down. The point of the plot, characters, etc, are just thrown away. Yes there are more action scenes but they seem to be sprinkled into the film at random.

Overall, this isn't a stinker as many other reviews seem to point out, but it does suffer from a weak second half.

Sergey Lukyanenko's books are a treasure trove of ideas, and should lend themselves well to adaptations. Night Watch was a good one. Chernovik, however, is a mess. Too much has been crammed into a single movie. The visuals are spectacularly, but the numbers of characters, worlds, the weird transitions, the lack of character development or even fleshing, makes it nearly impossible to follow. Paradoxaly, the rhythm lulls several times in the movie, and keeping attention is difficult. Too bad.

Film without the slightest sense, poorly written and with an avalanche of both logical and plot holes. In general the film opens very well giving you a very good introduction that makes you empathize with the protagonist and makes you enter completely into the story, but after the beginning the film begins to decline in quality, meaning and continuity as if they had lost the desire to make the film, and in the end you wonder how it could have happened to this film to degenerate in this way.