Reviews
Baader (2002)
Just not clever enough
I have to disagree with a lot of comments in here, even though I can understand why it is so easy to get the movie wrong.
Fact is that it mixes fiction with actual facts. Whether or not this is appropriate for a topic as sensitive as this one can be debated, but I think that it is legitimate as such.
I would disagree with the guy writing that the intention of the movie is to create a cult around the personality of Baader - that cult was there long before that movie, and still is nurtured, not only among leftist and teenager-circles.
My impression was rather that the movie tries to reflect a point of view that was not so unlikely in the 70s - the one of a certain hidden admiration for the RAF as a romantic reflection of the "out-law", fighting for freedom. At some point in the movie, there's said that according to a survey, 25% of the people in West Germany had sympathies for the Baader-Meinhof-gang - that is historically correct. I don't want to say that the end justifies the means, and it was soon after the first people were killed by the RAF that sympathies started to vanish. (You also have to know that during the time shown in the movie, there had not been even nearly as many people falling victim to the RAF as shown in the movie. The RAF started to be fairly more unscrupulous and violent in the later years, sometimes referred to as the "2nd or 3rd generation" of the RAF.)
So, I would argue that the movie has a right to exist not as a biopic or a semi-documentary, but as a reflection of a certain (maybe guilty) fascination for a subject that is not one single person's, but some sort of cultural phenomenon.
And here comes the big HOWEVER:
I have to agree with the people arguing that this movie does not offer much to people who are not familiar with the history of the RAF. Not only will it be rather erratic to them at parts, I imagine, but there's also a certain danger to it. If you know the facts, you are able to read the movie as an interpretation of historical events that is as well known as the facts themselves - thus, it becomes a contra-statement. If you do not know those facts or the debate around them, you certainly can get the impression of Andreas Baader as some sort of tragical hero - movie-style. And you certainly can say a lot about the RAF and Baader as a person, but that certainly is far from the truth.
A whole different thing is the fact that the movie has obvious flaws as a movie. The casting is not the smartest one. Frank Giering most of the time rather seems to be try-hard cool than really charismatic - I just don't buy the fact that this guy should be able to lead that many people into illegality. Especially since he doesn't really say many smart thing. Now, I do know that this seems to be true to the historical facts (Baader never was the theorist of the group, and there are a lot of people who would argue that the RAF never was about a theoretical base in the first place), but since Baader is doing pretty much all of the talking and all the other members of the RAF are reduced to mere bystanders, the overall impression is a rather uneven one. I would say that the weak dialogs are one of the biggest flaws of the movie. Plus, the director is sometimes really over-obvious with what he wants us to see, so that especially when it comes to romance (and there is one, because there obviously had to be some sort of Bonny&Clide-theme in it), it sometimes even comes close to cheesy. If it would have been a little more exaggerated, it could have worked for the movie, to make more clear the intentional fictionality of it, but unfortunately, it often looks more like the director's or the actors' incompetence of doing better.
Unfortunately, the movie is by far not as clever as the idea it is based on.
Dnevnoy dozor (2006)
Sold out to Fox?
Damn, reading all those positive comments, I really wonder if I saw the same movie.
Let me first start off with telling you that I was really astonished by the first movie, "Night Watch". Sure, it had its flaws, but still, it looked great, it was refreshingly original and most of all - it was atmospheric. To sum it up in a short statement: It left me longing for more.
Then I watched the sequel, "Day Watch", and I just didn't get it... all I could think was: God damnit, what the hell went wrong there? "Day Watch" was nothing but flaws. The worst problem of it is probably that it has one of the worst scripts I came around in a long time... there's simply no point to it (and no, it's not that I wouldn't have understood it). And what is so bad about that is the fact that it not only gives not a damn about the novels it should be supposed to be based on - it also totally ignores its predecessor. I've somewhere read that after Fox bought the rights to it, they urged the whole story into an early termination. As a result, "Day Watch" is just a total mess.
Part one succeeded in establishing a dark, aggrieving setting with more or less strong characters and ended with a bunch of prophecies that really pronounced some major threats to come in part two... But honestly, guys, what DO we have there? It's a huge mess of story lines (some finished, some not) that really do not help to advance the plot in the slightest. The characters are reduced to bystanders (like Bear) in the best case and to total clowns in the worst (hey, what exactly does Anton do in the last hour of the movies? He totters around drunk... what happens to Olga? What happened to the threatening presence of Zavulon? And, damn, why does Yegor never show any sign of becoming the great, fate-turning wizard that he's foretold to become?) Other characters get way too much screen-time, only to get an opportunity to establish a goofy romance or show some flesh... and what's the parrot guy doing in it anyway??? It is A TERRIBLY SCRIPTED MOVIE. Face it. The apocalypse is the result of a toy-ran-amok? It's not what I expected. Definitely not.
What's maybe the worst thing for me is that there are certain signs that point to all this having happened on purpose. There are at least two scenes (shower, anyone?) that are so horribly cheesy that there's actually only one word to describe it: Camp. Now, I certainly can take a little bit of camp once in a while, and I also did like the humor in some of the scenes in part one (and you could even argue if there were not some camp aspects in that as well) - but all in all, "Night Watch" was more or less serious in it's tone. "Day Watch" is not camp in the clever sense - it's just goofy. It's not fun. It's out of place there, I think.
In fact, I thought the movie was so different from part one - and sadly, in all the wrong points - that I asked myself how it was possible to send it all down the gutter like that. I thought that maybe the studio or the director got in a fight over something and either one of them tried to pay it back in that way to the other, or that somebody lost a bet or so there, or... I really don't know. I just can't understand it. And also can't understand why they more or less had it end in a way that there's no sense in really making a part 3 anymore... Guess that's the only good thing I can say about it: After that disaster, I'm actually glad that there maybe will be no movie to follow.
(And even if I have to disappoint all you Slavophil guys out there who are just proud to finally have a cool movie you can show to foreign audiences: Good special effects and the state as a sequel to a good movie doesn't make this a good movie. I'm afraid so.)