Outlander

No, not the TV show based on Diana Gabaldon’s 1991 time-travel romance novel. This Outlander is an independent film released in 2009 that is yet another reworking of the Beowulf myth, and so it has some themes and feel in common with The 13^th Warrior. Despite not having any supernatural elements, this film likewise is one Sword & Sorcery fans are likely to enjoy.

This is an SF-flavored reimagining of Beowulf that casts both he and monster as visitors from outer space. Protagonist Kainan opens the story by crashing his spaceship in what turns out to be 8^th century Norway, and along with him comes the reason he crashed – a hulking, malevolent alien predator called a Moorwen. With his ship sunk in a lake and lost, Kainan has none of his advanced technology to fall back on, and has to make his way among the suspicious locals. Then he discovers that his nemesis also survived, and a battle to the end ensues.

The cast is surprisingly full of well-known names. James Caviezel stars as the hero, with Sophia Myles as his inevitable love interest. Jack Huston plays Wulfric, the prince who starts as Kainan’s enemy and then becomes his friend. John Hurt is here as King Hrothgar, and Ron Perlman is at his bearded, bald-headed best as rival king Gunnar. The movie spends a surprising amount of time with character development and building up secondary characters, and it pays off surprisingly well, as when the beast starts slaughtering villagers you actually have some feeling for them.

The Moorwen itself is pretty awesome. It was designed by Patrick Tatopoulos and looks it, and while it’s not a blazingly original design, it works. The CGI is a bit dodgy, but they made the good decision to mostly shoot the creature in darkness and have it be bioluminescent. This creates some fantastic visuals as it prowls in the dark, light flickering and pouring over it, so it is hard to even tell what it is shaped like. While the effects don’t look photo-real (this was 2008 after all), they did manage to give the beast real personality.

They give the story a twist, as the background is that Kainan is from an advanced human civilization (that apparently ‛seeded’ Earth as a colony – don’t overthink it.) and he helped exterminate the Moorwen in order for his people to take over their planet. They left a soft colony behind and the last of the monsters slaughtered all the humans – including Kainan’s wife and child, of course. This is bog-standard backstory stuff, but it does add a layer to the movie, as both Kainan and the monster have motivation to do what they do, and neither one of them is going to stop until one of them is dead.

The final battle, with the hero and his allies venturing into a waterfall-filled cavern to kill the monster, is pretty epic and quite gruesome, as the Moorwen has piled up all the corpses of its victims to serve as food for it’s offspring – of course it has an offspring. A lot of the plucky side characters die, Kainan has to rescue the girl and his little surrogate son – there’s not much in this screenplay that is not cliched, and the beats are predictable – and it all comes to the end you expect, when Kainan destroys the beacon that would have brought him a rescue and stays behind to be king.

Is it predictable? Yeah. But it spends more time on character than most movies like this, and it at least tries to depict the huge gulf in understanding of science that exists between the outer-space hero and his new Viking friends. The use of highly accurate, reconstructed Old Norse for a lot of dialogue is also a point of interest. Weapons and armor are not totally historical, but better than the usual, and the violence is satisfyingly bloody. Kainan does not start out as a hero, only wanting to escape this primitive world, and his change of heart is convincingly drawn. This is a very pulpy, SF-themed fantasy film that fans of S&S, action, and horror will be able to enjoy.