It’s a good movie because it tells a coherent and fun story, involving characters with clear motives and personalities. If you do those things you’re 80% of the way to an enjoyable film. Throw in a terrific villain, good swordfighting, good music, and some great one liners, and you’ve got a fun movie.
Not every movie has to be a $200 million production or be a work of genius. You can make a movie that’s just FUN, but you need a coherent story, a well paced script, and clearly motivated and drawn characters. Highlander has those things. So why wouldn’t people like it?
Given that by the 20th century he’s had some time to learn a few tricks, it’s not a huge shock that he might have changed his style a few times. I don’t believe his choice of weapon is ever explained, and like the origin of immortals, I think the movie’s a lot better off for not explaining it.
Claymores of the early 16th century were heavy swords, sometimes weighing over 5 pounds. In a mass battle there’s a lot of value in a weapon that will crush its way through armor; in duelling, I’d think the claymore would be less useful than something more nimble.
I haven’t seen the film in awhile, but IIRC, Ramirez (Connery) was once married to a Japanese woman whose father was a great swordmaker or something like that. I assumed that MacLeod was using Ramirez’s sword.
Or it could simply be that he used a katana because it’s a smaller, lighter, faster sword than a giant-ass claymore. Or just because they are better.
Um, it is actually a pretty major plot point. The katana carried by Connor was taken from Ramirez after he was beheaded by the Kurgen. Ramirez received the sword as a present from the father of his wife Shakiko, Masamune (presumably Gorō Nyūdō Masamune, although the dates mentioned in the film do not correspond to his lifetime), and the police forensic scientist Brenda Wyatt, who is apparently an expert in metallurgical science, determines that the sword was forged by processes unknown in that era. How Connor learned to expertly wield a katana, which has a substantially different technique than the longsword or traditional claymore, is not explained, although he would probably be at a disadvantage against the Kurgen with his massive greatsword and near invulnerability to slashing wounds.
Highlander was a B movie, but it was the best B movie ever! The premise was great, they explained it enough that you knew what was going on but left it simple with some mystery. The fight choreography wasn’t great, but most of the fights still looked fantastic with the lighting, setting, and camera angles. It was just ridiculous and over the top enough to be trippy. And the soundtrack was simply amazing.
The DVD commentary is definitely worth listening to. They filmed all of Connery’s scenes in a week, and he read the opening narration over the phone from his bathroom. There’s a hilarious story about how they used product placement to get free booze, and lots of good discussion about making films on the cheap.
It’s important to remember that very little in the way of fantasy/sci-fi was coming out at the time Highlander was released. It became a cult hit partly because it was so unusual. It was actually a pretty glossy, fairly big budget film, with a major star in it (Sean Connery, who was just coming out of a down period). The effects were great for the time. Still, it is ultimately just a cult film with a cool premise. There’s so much fantasy stuff in mainstream media today that its hard to imagine how things were at that time.
Yeah, at the time the list of halfway-decent “serious” fantasy films was pretty much EXCALIBUR, LADYHAWKE, and CONAN. (The Princess Bride came out the next year. I had a hard time thinking of a third live-action fantasy film that actually took its premise seriously. You’re pretty much down to low-budget stuff like THE SWORD AND THE SORCERER after that.)
Agree with those who say it’s not a true classic but a popcorn movie/cult classic.
This is a huge part of it. For whatever reason, unusual or unpredictable concepts were not found in fantasy at the time. Merely by having the “immortals battling to the last survivor” they immediately moved outside a very tired and conventional box…and then they went a step farther, and didn’t explain it. Someone else already mentioned the lack of “expository” scenes, where someone painstakingly explains the situation for the audience’s benefit. That helped the feel of the movie tremendously, because the premise is that Lambert doesn’t know about it in advance, and thus the moviegoer’s experience mirrors Lambert’s character’s experience of being immediately thrown in over his head as lots of highly skilled strangers who know what’s going on seize the initiative and force him to react, react, react without getting time to think. The movie imposes a Darwinian simplicity on Lambert’s actions – stay alive and don’t worry about the rest.
That’s what makes his final victory laudable instead of sinister – he didn’t plan to come out on top; he never even spent much time thinking about it; he is the only “innocent” among the immortals. He sought only to stay alive and avenge his friend and eventually “backed into” the top spot in the process.
Right. Highlander II is an aggressively bad movie in every respect – so bad it’s not even remotely in the same league. Implausible and stupid even by its own rules; ham-handedly directed and badly acted, and a plot that immediately turns expository, giving up the strength of the first movie…and said exposition is stupid.
H II was my nominee for worst movie of all time until The Thin Red Line was released, bumping H II to second-worst.
Consider just a few of the numberless flaws in the movie:
Horrific direction. Much of the action is telegraphed in advance. Very early on there’s a fight on a catwalk over a road. Both parties reverse the advantage several times, and each one looks down at the road. In the distance, a truck starts. We see the truck pull out onto the road. More wrestling on the catwalk. Each party looks down again. Trucker does not look up. Each party looks at approaching truck. By now even the dullest movie watcher knows they will fall from the catwalk to the top of the truck. Lo and behold, an agonizingly long time later, they fall from the catwalk to the top of the truck! There’s a palpable sense of “Christ, that took long enough.”
Implausible action by the principals. We’ve seen the heroine lead a resistance group, swinging on a line in black ninja-like garb, shooting up guards with automatic weapons. She’s skilled and pragmatic. When she realizes there’s something funny about the hero, she asks him straight up, as a modern American girl with a take-no-shit attitude, “Tell me what’s going on and don’t bullshit me.” Out of nowhere, our hero, obeying the movie’s mind-bogglingly stupid rewrite which explains the immortals, says “I am from the planet Zeist and I cannot die.” Now we as the audience know it happens to be (oh so unfortunately) true, but there’s no question that, without accompanying explanation, it’s the absolute definition of “bullshit a player would try on a stupid girl,” and she certainly will not believe it. But instead she kisses him and says no more about it. ??? Minutes later, he has to show her how to work a shotgun – this resistance fighter we’ve watched using guns and grenades in earlier scenes. Now that she’s been exposed to his manliness, she’s forgotten all that?
Stupid physics. Actually, the shield idea is neat – to save earth from UV rays after ozone destruction, a shield was built that blocks out the sun. The earth’s ozone layer has regenerated since, but the evil corporation won’t tell anyone, and still maintains the shield for profit. Now, that’s actually a decent concept that could bear fruit. But they painfully drill into the viewers’ heads that maintaining the shield takes most of earth’s energy output. The evil corporation is literally taking almost all our energy and beaming it up to the shield, which would crumble immediately if it was not receiving the constant stream of energy. Said energy is hitting a receiver so mighty it can receive this giant beam of energy and remain undamaged.
So what’s the good guys’ plan for destroying the shield? You guessed it – apply even more energy to that receiver that’s unaffected by earth’s entire energy output, in the hope that a little more will suddenly break it. Never mind we are told repeatedly that any interruption in the energy flow will destroy the shield. All they need to do is unplug it, or turn on a bunch of hair dryers and compete with it. A brownout would win the game for them; they don’t need a mystical source of energy to smash the unsmashable thing in the sky.
Stupider physics. At one point, a villain jams the throttle on a subway car to the max. We see the speedometer rising as it accelerates. Because the moviemakers are stupid, the speedometer goes to four hundred miles an hour. Much screaming ensues as the frail glass-and-aluminum subway cars rocket through the tube at 400 mph while the principals fight. Eventually the cars hit a concrete wall at four hundred miles an hour – smashing through the concrete, breaking glass windows, and tossing people from their seats. The heroes get up and keep fighting (they’re immortal) while the human victims of the 400 mph crash into a solid wall help each other up and brush glass out of their hair.
Stupid plotting. The immortals, it turns out, are not immortal on Zeist – they’re ordinary there. They’ve been sent here, where they are effectively immortal gods, as punishment. Earth is a penal colony for an autocracy (note that while here, they are out of reach of the autocracy and very powerful…that’s their idea of punishment?)
It goes on and on like that. A movie that penalizes the viewer for paying attention, for anticipating the action, for listening to the dialogue, for liking the previous movie it’s based on, for understanding the way physics works, for understanding the way people interact.
.
Besides the fact that it completely craps all over the plot of the first movie, I seem to remember I seem to remember a completely nonsensical bit of dialogue that was so awful it even struck me as bad, and I was a little kid when I saw it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but right before Ironside’s character sent his cronies to kill Macleod, I recall the interaction going like this “Kill Macleod” “But he’s old, he’s going to die soon anyway” “I don’t care, kill Macleod”. So, the big baddie who sent him there hundreds of years ago didn’t bother to send people to kill him at any point before, but now that he’s almost dead, he just can’t wait those last few years.
And the whole bringing Ramirez back, I could accept it not making sense, but I seem to recall it being utterly unnecessary. Worse, I also recall his re-death being utterly unnecessary.
Also, as bad as Highlander 2 is, Battlefield: Earth is at least as bad, I never saw the Thin Red Line, but if that’s that bad too, then it can’t be any higher than third worst.