Highlander: the SciFi Movie Disaster commentary

[gategrrl]

Don't worry, it's short. I only saw the show as I passed by my supine Guy on the couch, and listened to his baffled comments on the movie flickering on the small screen (not so small screen) before him. He asked me what I knew of the production - I told him the little I knew, garnered from my flisters: it was written by the series writers. It was originally slated to be a theater released, downgraded to a direct to DVD release, and finally ended up bought by SciFi Channel.

There were many perplexed observations out of my Guy's mouth every time he saw me. He'd pause the DVR, blink in amazment, and start on rhetorical questions. Why were the characters misbehaving? Why didn't they get a better editor? What the hell was going on with the *script*?

Alas, there were no answers to those questions. He watched straight through to the ending (with judicious fast forwarding to the "good" bits) and shook his head, his expression horrified and bewildered, speechless for a few minutes. There was not much more to say about it.

It IS sad. We used to be, if not huge fans of the show, at least highly enthusiastic of its premise and its myriad story possiblities.

I'm glad I missed this Highlander movie. I had the BEST Highlander Movie Moment when I went to see Phantom of the Opera in the theater with a friend a few years ago. She leaned over to me when the Phantom and the Hero started swordfighting in the graveyard and whispered: "There can be only One!"   I still fall over laughing when I remember.

Comments

I missed the first 25 minutes

[justalurkr.livejournal.com]

But I still don't think seeing them would have made that any better.

Beyond Methos-on-a-Motorcycle-in LeatherSQUEE, I can't think of a single thing right about that movie. Comparing and contrasting to the hero, the villain, the premise and the end result of the first movie with Christopher Lambert, The Source seemed an object lesson in just how far a series can fall.

More frightening than the movie itself was something at the official website about its being the first in a trilogy. If any more of that tripe gets greenlit, I'll know there's a pact with the netherworld in play.

[nialla]

I've been a fan of Highlander since the original movie, but none of the movies since then worked, because they always erased what came before.

The series did well too, treating the first movie as a sort of AU, which was fine, but it even got to the point where its own internal logic was falling apart.

I don't think I can carry enough logic bombs to get through this movie. We're in a futuristic not-quite-post-apocalyptic world (with cannibals!), yet there's still apparently easy access to satellite communications and gasoline. Oh, and let's not forget, Joe hasn't aged, so just exactly how far in the future are we?

And there's a celestial alignment that's going to do what now? There's alignments all the time and it means jack squat, but in this case, the planets are shown to be bigger than the moon in our sky, so the gravitational forces should have torn up everything in the solar system. Which would have been an improvement.

All of this just to say that the Immortals apparently got the wrong memo and the Game wasn't what they were supposed to be doing all these millenia? It wasn't all about "there can be only one" of them after all. And only a woman we've never seen before, who's the most recent love of Duncan's long live, has to be the ultimate in all that is Mary Sue and Speshul, with visions and stuff. And we're supposed to care why exactly?

Oh, be glad you didn't watch this. It would have meant spending time trying to forget it.