Highlander Thoughts
On Monday night, in an effort to stave off the back-to-work-after-a-long-weekend-blues, Ailsa and I rewatched Highlander. Wonderuflly bonkers, I would previously have described this film as nothing but a 90 minute Queen music video that has me bubbling in the middle but super-pumped through the rest as heads get severed, lightning strikes and guitars wail. However, I was struck on a rewatch that the film might be mroe complex than I had originally considered. Bizarre though this sounds, this film may have artistic positives.
I knew the story bounced around the timeline but only on a rewatch did the way information is revealed really occur to me. The presentation of the story is not the A->B->C progression you'd associate with a brainless action movie - substantial time passes before it's explained that Connor is immortal, that decapitation is the only way of killing him and the other rules of The Game. Even then, some things are more implied than outright stated: the absorption of energy from each killed immortal is never outright codified here and famously the film doesn't even attempt an origin for this strange power source. (The sequel, which did give them an origin...let's not talk about that.)
Highlander doesn't require the audience to be geniuses but it doesn't treat them like idiots either. It starts in media res with heads getting chopped off and shows us a 16th century man who looks identical to the one we just saw in modern-day New York. Of course trailers and adverts can't dodge explaining this a little, and the baggage of sequels/TV shows/etc have rendered the shock minimal, but the film still takes time to build a mystery around that issue.
Then there's cinematography. Ailsa noted some very pretty shots which are much artier than anythign you'd get in the typial Arnie or Stallone explosion-fest of the time. Connor's face melting into the Mona Lisa poster and panning up from the fisk tank to a shot of the boat on the loch are actually quite cool, and the aerial shot of the wrestling match at the start that spins and pans across a wide space is quite imrpessive for 1980s tech. (Indeed, the film required a technique be designed to do such a shot by Garrett Brown, the man who designed the Steadicam.) Ms Film Journalism Masters was slightly puzzled to discover that, excluding the awful visible strings after the final battle scene, the film actually looks very well-shot.
If like me you loved Highlander but only in a 12 year old boy way, the film may be worth a re-evaluation.
I knew the story bounced around the timeline but only on a rewatch did the way information is revealed really occur to me. The presentation of the story is not the A->B->C progression you'd associate with a brainless action movie - substantial time passes before it's explained that Connor is immortal, that decapitation is the only way of killing him and the other rules of The Game. Even then, some things are more implied than outright stated: the absorption of energy from each killed immortal is never outright codified here and famously the film doesn't even attempt an origin for this strange power source. (The sequel, which did give them an origin...let's not talk about that.)
Highlander doesn't require the audience to be geniuses but it doesn't treat them like idiots either. It starts in media res with heads getting chopped off and shows us a 16th century man who looks identical to the one we just saw in modern-day New York. Of course trailers and adverts can't dodge explaining this a little, and the baggage of sequels/TV shows/etc have rendered the shock minimal, but the film still takes time to build a mystery around that issue.
Then there's cinematography. Ailsa noted some very pretty shots which are much artier than anythign you'd get in the typial Arnie or Stallone explosion-fest of the time. Connor's face melting into the Mona Lisa poster and panning up from the fisk tank to a shot of the boat on the loch are actually quite cool, and the aerial shot of the wrestling match at the start that spins and pans across a wide space is quite imrpessive for 1980s tech. (Indeed, the film required a technique be designed to do such a shot by Garrett Brown, the man who designed the Steadicam.) Ms Film Journalism Masters was slightly puzzled to discover that, excluding the awful visible strings after the final battle scene, the film actually looks very well-shot.
If like me you loved Highlander but only in a 12 year old boy way, the film may be worth a re-evaluation.