Movie Review – “Outlander”

Reviewed by Gary Pollard (first aired on RTHK Radio 4’s “Morning Call”)

“Outlander” is a textbook example of how a good concept can be ruined by an over-reliance on Hollywood formula. The concept is that a homicidal extra-terrestrial creature lands on Earth, something we’ve seen more than a few times. What makes this one potentially more interesting is that it lands in early eighth century Norway, in the era and land of the Vikings.

I could see potential in that idea. Here we have a group of people, much more primitive than we are, lacking in technology, and without the cultural frame of reference to grasp the concept of extra terrestrial beings. And then they face one. If one made it with a sense of authenticity, it could work well.

Unfortunately, once they had the concept the film-makers turned to the Hollywood book of screenwriting formula. Co-writing with Dirk Blackman, director Howard McCain decided that Vikings vs. aliens isn’t enough. He has to bring to Earth a good alien, who looks remarkably like a human, and even can fall in love with them, to fight the monster, which he calls a Moorwen.

The good alien, Kainan, is played by Jim Caviezel. As the movie opens, he crashes his spaceship into a lake. Something glowing escapes from it under the water. Kainan rises to the surface with one badly injured colleague. Then he falls unconscious. When he wakes the next morning, his colleague is dead. With the aid of a computer the flashes information through  his eye he sets about learning Norwegian, which – for our convenience – is English. In fact, his first “Norwegian” expression is a four-letter one beginning with “F” that linguists consider to owe more to the Anglo-Saxon.

Things are not looking too bad for Kainan so far, apart from crash landing his ship. He does have a ray gun of some sort, with which he shoots a tree, and instantly sets out on a hunt through the local woods for his quarry. He finds his way to an encampment that’s been burned to the ground. All the bodies have disappeared.

Despite being a super advanced alien, or maybe because of it, he’s not wilderness savvy, which is why a group of Vikings is able to sneak up on him even though they are on horseback, make him lose his ray gun in a river, tie him up, and take him back to their fortified village, Herot.

At the village wise and wizened Rothgar (played by John Hurt) his doing that warrior type thing of having a swordfight with his daughter Freya (Sophia Myles). She’s feisty and capable with a weapon . The female protagonist always is in this kind of movie. And since dear old dad can’t best her in combat she tells him she won’t marry Wulfric (Jack Huston) the man he wants her to marry.

Wulfric, coincidentally, is the same Viking who has captured our good alien hero. Returning, he tells Rothgar the nearby village has been destroyed and no survivors have been found.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, they all think the stranger must have done it. He tries to convince them he’s come here to kill a dragon. Nobody believes him until that monster comes barging out of the forest at night, unseen by most people despite the fact it glows in the dark, and kills several villagers.

In that roustabout way that passes for courtship in these movies, Kainan thumps Freya. Freya later thumps Kainan .They must be ideally suited, despite him being extra terrestrial and all.

Naturally the villagers gradually realize they do have to go out and kill the monster. Kainan reveals a few things from his past that show why the Moorwen is so ticked off, and – as importantly  – that back on the planet they lived on before it had killed his wife and child.

There’s a bit of an ecological message here as Kainan’s people had wiped out an entire race to make themselves a little lebensraum, but he’s more or less over that now.

To complicate things a little, but not too much, the chieftain of the neighbouring village Gunnar (Ron Perlman) comes back, convinced that Rothgar’s warrior have killed his people and determined to get revenge. We, of course, know the real enemy is not human and that they will have to band together to kill it, although as the hero of the movie always gets to kill the monster with the help of feisty girlfriend, I supposed it doesn’t matter if they have ten men or a thousand on their side.

We also know that there’s a love triangle here that is going to need to get resolved. No prizes for guessing how that happens.

Watching “Outlander” you keep having flashbacks to all the other movies that you’ve seen all these things in. There’s even an orphaned child (Bailey Maughan) based on the wild kid in the Mad Max movies. In a moment of attempted wit, the kid reveals his name is Eric. Eric the Viking. If you don’t know what they are getting at here, Google it. Or maybe don’t bother. It’s not that spectacular an in-joke.

As is usual in these movies too, the men look grungy and unwashed, the women all look like they’ve just climbed, glowing out of the bath, or at least the young ones do.

There isn’t much reason to see this film, although I can always watch John Hurt, and there’s a warmth and sexiness about Sophia Myles that’s appealing.

The main problem is that neither the writing nor the directing has any flair. Of course, the film is hinting that the alien equates to Grendel and Kainan might be the origin of Beowulf, but there isn’t a convincing attempt to make this the world of Beowulf or of the Vikings. In its flat directing and predictable art direction it reminds you more of an episode of “Hercules” of “Xena the Warrior Princess” on TV.

Of course, you can look at the concept and think that Vikings versus aliens was bound to lead to a lousy movie, but I don’t think that was necessarily the case at all. After all, Stanley Kubrick showed us our primate ancestors confronting aliens in “2001 A Space Odyssey” and fully captured the wonder and lack of comprehension as well as producing a great piece of cinema.

The lesson here is that if you are going to begin with a great idea, throw the Hollywood rule book away, because otherwise it always sends you down predictable paths. This film could have had so much that was original and intriguing. In the end, nothing here is original or intriguing.