(A Superhero Named) Tony

Director Timur Bekmambetov’s vampire-fantasy film Night Watch bills itself as the “first chapter in an epic fantasy trilogy,” which is comforting because had that been kept secret, the movie might be horribly disappointing. The promise of more to come is comforting. Plus, the world has been without an epic trilogy for a few months now.

As a stand-alone story, this first chapter would be mostly disappointing for all the banality hiding under the flash. The movie’s mythology — based on the novel by Sergei Lukyanenko — is built on the idea of more-or-less-than-human “Others” who walk among us and align themselves as either “Light” or “Dark.” An ancient war between the two sides led to a truce and the establishment of a supernatural police bureaucracy — a Night Watch and a Day Watch to keep each other in line. There’s also something about a Chosen One, but nothing really comes of it.

The most original nuance here is making a vampire story of the Cold War ethos of peacekeeping via threats — from Russia’s point of view, to boot. But not enough is made of it (yet) to be poignant. Really, the film’s greatest achievements are its design and abundant special effects, which owe as much to Bekmambetov’s background directing commercials as they do to video games and The Matrix and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But for every OMG in the movie, there’s a WTF. Ain’t It Cool News diehards may be able to explain all the flies or the vortex or the deus ex machina that ends a curse. They might even convince you there’s something deeper to it all, but so far the movie’s purportedly epic myth legend thing is strictly WYSIWYG.

Did I mention it’s in Russian? No, really. There are subtitles, of course, provided by the kind folks at Fox Searchlight. And in what is no doubt a compromise between Fox’s Marketing and Film Nerd departments, they are perhaps the most interesting subtitles I’ve ever seen. They whoosh, whisk, explode, dissolve and shift in color. It’s all very creative, but I sense there was still a meeting in the front office declaring that upping the movie’s sensory overload would help it reach a wider audience.

Thankfully, it works: I knew when characters were shouting, because the words got big and shook, and when they were talking about blood, because the word “blood” turned red. Fox gets an A for effort. Perhaps I only missed some of the story because I was so intrigued by what the words were doing, and not what they meant.

Still, what’s with the flies?

When input to an Avid break-out box, videotape decks tend to display different signal effects on an NTSC monitor, depending on their various connections — component, composite, serial digital interface, etc. The deck needn’t be playing a tape, just turned on with the Avid expecting to capture a signal. What results appears to be a sort of distortion or interference, like a relative of the white noise/snow of older TV sets. Various patterns and colors streak randomly along the screen as a visual representation of a pure electronic current.

The most obvious and unique and beautiful example I’ve found so far is the component video signal, commonly denoted as “Y-R-B,” for each of the three cables that distill the luminance and chrominance components into a picture. As a raw input into the Avid, the Y-R-B signal generates a pattern that onscreen travels left to right on a steady and infinite parade. The colors are primarily red and green on black (though with one deck I’ve also seen pinkish-white) and morph and move and change of their own will. The component signal is alive.

Like all forms of life, it’s probable that this phenomenon can be explained with numbers and equations and other lifeless things. Spare me.

If the tape is ejected while still rolling, the coup is more violent. The video image halts and falls into a state of steady decay, a sort of electronic entropy. As if a dam broke, and photorealism were swept away as the component river recommences its rightward flow off screen.

Where it leads, I don’t know.