Movie review: Outlander

by John P. Meyer

While Outlander's story is a big, ridiculous logistical mess (thanks to a script by wagsters Dirk Blackman and Howard McCain, who also have another of their film treatments opening this week), it does at least have a genuinely fearsome sfx creature prowling around its perimeter - and, eventually, rambling rough-shod into the center of the narrative arena. In fact, if you take this movie in the proper spirit (i.e., like these guys), it can be a real hoot to watch.

In a nutshell, what you've got here is your basic Beowulf meets Alien vs. Predator, with Jesus (in the person of James Caviezel, who played everyone's favorite savior in The Passion of the Christ) thrown in for good measure.

Caviezel plays an alien from outer space named Kainan who crash lands (in an Earth-orbital intro sequence straight out of The Thing - John Carpenter version) into a pristine Scandinavian lake. Kainan sputters his way to shore, along with his homing beacon, his retro '50's ray gun and another device that I'll tell you about in a minute. In order to convey to us, the moviegoers, the amazing power of his space blaster, he triggers off a bolt in the general direction of "away from him" and fries both a pine tree and a bit of lakeshore, leading to the flopping demise of four fish. We get the idea that if he comes up against either pine trees or fish in the course of events, they are going to be toast. (Until he drops his blaster into a nearby cataract. DAMMIT, JIM!)

The other device I mentioned is some sort of ocular-input language force-feed thingamabob, which provides us with our first really good belly laugh as Kainan groans and cringes while staring into the vibrating light beam as the entire Viking lingo is injected into his brain in a matter of seconds. Through his eye. Funny, funny stuff.

As indicated, Kainan soon drops his mega-blaster into a waterfall after being startled somewhat - then knocked silly - by a confrontational Viking fellow named Wulfric (Jack Huston, wearing leather and long greasy hair like he was born for it. Or with it.).

Cut to the Viking stronghold of King Rothgar (John Hurt), who finds himself engaged in a fierce sword battle with - um - his daughter Freya (Sophia Myles), who seems to have a problem with the wedding arrangements her daddy has planned for her. So, naturally, she's trying to chop him to pieces. Fortunately, one of the two combatants stumbles and falls before any mortal blows are struck and the entire fight is quickly forgotten. Even more so after Wulfric returns with news of a) the captured odd person with the short haircut, and b) the total destruction of the nearby camp of prospective future in-law Gunnar (Ron Perlman, trading in his motorcycle chaps - and his sawn-off devil horns - for a filthy fur suit). Fortunately for Gunnar, he and most of his warriors are off on a pillaging mission.

Wulfric thinks Kainan had something to do with the slaughter at Gunnar's camp, and of course Kainan - even though he now knows the language - can do little to convince him otherwise, though he is able to point to the dragon motif carved into a nearby piece of furniture: "That thing did it," is his basic premise.

Which is true, in its way - the carnivorous creature that stowed along aboard his spaceship from an alien planet is indeed rather dragon-like - but of course the unvarnished story would prove impossible to sell to his captors, so he more or less gives up and lets them tie him up to a post in a storeroom while the azure-eyed Freya works up the dramatic wherewithal to wander in under the guise of attending to his superficial abrasions and fall in love with him. (Oops. Spoiler alert!)

The rest is all barbarian pomp and gruesome dragon's lair circumstance; here are a few of the comedic highlights:

* For a village made entirely of straw, there are an awful lot of flaming braziers and merrily-burning candles around - the Viking fire marshal must be on extended leave.

* Those crazy Vikings sure know how to have fun in the mead hall (I mean, beyond the fundamental swilling of mead): witness the game in which competitors jog around the hall on shields held aloft by those Vikings not fortunate enough to be the ones doing the actual jogging.

* After discovering his village totally destroyed and his kinfolk slaughtered, Gunnar and his men storm Rothgar's wooden battlements; he succeeds in bashing his way into the place and sets himself laying bloody waste to the contents - then for no apparent reason calls a halt. As if his arms got tired of swinging his war hammer or something.

* In the laugh-riot high point of the film, a monk-robed Christian missionary appears out of nowhere to amble from the stockade to confront the fire-breathing alien monster, bearing his upraised cross as a talismanic protective device. (What the Hell happened to Odin?)

There's a tragic alien homeland annihilation/genocide backstory that Kainan tries to feed us, but by this point we're unable to digest it: we'd rather just wallow in the conceptual cheese tray as he instructs his iron-age allies to fire up the wood-burning forge so he can hand-fashion some alien metal from the wreckage of his spaceship into a super-sword that looks a lot like the one used by Schwarzenneger in the Conan movies. (Hm... hello again, Howard McCain.) If I were Kainan, I'd probably have just searched the waters of the babbling brook beneath the cataract for my missing mega-blaster and saved everyone the trouble.

But where's the fun in that?

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