I guardiani dei mondi

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.

As a big fan of Lukjanenko, the author of the book and the book itself, I so wished the movie would be any good. But unfortunately it isn't. And I am very sad to give this review

First of all I would like to thank the author for a great story. For some reasons this book puts me in a special mental state, so I have listened to an audio version of it more than enough to know the story by heart.

Now about the movie. My major complain goes to the screenwriter. Almost all story lines and characters, including the main ones were changed so heavily, that the whole thing stopped to make any sense after the first 30 minutes of the movie. I probably said "whaat the hell??" 100 times watching the movie. Somehow, to my regret, bad screenwriting became an epidemic in the russian movie industry. It's like they think that if they add some visual effects to the movie, they are justified to make a sloppy work on the story, which is what a good movie is actually always about. Common guys, that is just a lazy thinking!

Ok, you might say that I am biased by the book and it's always difficult to convert a book to a movie. So what if you haven't read the book? To that I would say - it will be even worse to watch, because you will just fail to understand what the hell is going on. Characters suddenly start talking about things and calling names you've never heard before. In my opinion you will not understand motivations and the logic, so you will be left to sit and wonder who is doing what and why.

My advise - skip the movie, read or listen the book.

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.

...as intention. Because , it has beautiful premises, an interesting story and a lot of CGI effects. And a nice cast. But, scene by scene, it becomes a montagne russe. From the high level to the down. Once. And again. The best part- the resurrection of the memories about fairy tales. Including Russian . The worlds, the order keeper, the fundamental change of life - a fear of each from us- are good points . But the problem becomes with the wrong use of obsessive love story. Sure, Dante and Beatrice or, maybe,"What Dreams may Come". But the entire architecture of film is brocked. Sure, a seductive idea with high potential. But not enough for be credible. And real seductive.

I gave this film a chance, it took me a while to absorb the story and the theme, or the theme in general. To begin with, I have to write about the good sides of this film, and that is the theme, which is unique and has its own originality, that is actually the only good thing in this film. And now what I don't like. The actors do their work stiffly and unimpressively. The visual and audio performance is below average, some visual effects are good, but some are like watching a theater play (the moment when you know that the stone is made of cardboard in some scenes). Although the original and potentially interesting theme here is so sketchy, full of holes, inexplicable and stupid situations, almost the entire film you are lost and not in a positive way. Another major problem of this film is the duration of the film, the topic is big and there is a lot to process and process, show and explain, in this film it is all packed into a short period of time and in a hurry, and that is never good. Sometimes it's sad when someone discovers something new, something original and of great potential, and then it's not shown properly on the screen to the viewer.