Film Friday: Highlander (1986)

Highlander failed at the box office, making only $12 million worldwide on a $19 million investment, but it quickly found a cult following. This cult following was strong enough to spawn sequels and a television series. It’s never been clear why some films become cult classics, but I wonder if this film might not hold the answer?

** spoiler alert **

The Plot

Highlander stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, an immortal born in the 16th century Scottish Highlands. MacLeod is part of a group of immortals who are fighting each other to win some amazing power. To win this power, they need to be the last immortal left alive; immortals can only be killed by being decapitated. Interestingly, whenever one immortal kills another, he gains the knowledge and strength of that immortal.

The story flips back and forth between 1986 and various time periods in history where significant events happened to MacLeod. For example, we see him discover his immortality when he survives a mortal wound and he gets chased out of his village because his people think he’s made a deal with Satan. We see him trained by Sean Connery (Ramirez), who plays an Egyptian immortal masquerading as a Spaniard. We also see MacLeod’s first wife grow old and die. Each flashback gives us insight into his character.

In the 1986 storyline, we see MacLeod become a suspect in the decapitation murders of several people in New York City. What’s happening is that the final few immortals are being drawn together in New York (by something called “the quickening”) to fight to the death. . . “There can be only one!” The main bad guy is the Kurgan (Clancy Brown). The Kurgan is the strongest of the immortals and is evil to the core. He’s tried to kill MacLeod in the past, but never quite managed it. Now, he and MacLeod will fight with the fate of mankind hanging in the balance.

Too Smart For General Audiences?

It’s hard to tell what causes a film to become a cult classic. The general idea is that these are bad films which somehow offer something quirky which resonates with a certain segment of the population. But I wonder if that’s correct. I wonder if the truth isn’t that these films actually offer a combination of originality (perhaps too much originality for the general public) and a movie that is too smart for general audiences?

For most audiences, Highlander probably came across like this: “That’s not how they did Back to the Future.” The film stock is grainy. The sets and costumes are not grand. The lead actor is an unknown French-American actor Christopher Lambert (whose English is not great) even though Sean Connery could have been cast. And the story flips back and forth without explanation for quite some time. . . a plot device guaranteed to confuse the simps.

But if you look deeper, you see something different. First, the grainy quality of the film sets this film apart visually. It gives it a gritty, visceral feeling which makes the film unlike anything else out at the time. This sets the mood and keeps the film from feeling like a low-budget science fiction film – it’s also helped the film avoid feeling dated. Add to this an awesome soundtrack by Queen, high quality effects (sparingly used), and excellently choreographed sword fights, and you get a truly high quality film. . . but you have to be willing to look past the “this isn’t what films should look like” mentality of the general public.

Secondly, the acting is actually quite good. I would venture to say that this is Connery’s best role in a long time at this point in his career, and he fits the lively yet violent Ramirez perfectly. . . he would not have fit MacLeod. Lambert also fits the role perfectly because his accent gives him an outsider quality which is essential to set him apart from the other actors who are playing mortals. It makes him feel different, which is something Connery in the lead would not have done. And Clancy Brown is just all kinds of awesome, as always.

 

Where this film really pays off, however, is in the writing. The story is ingenious in many ways. It involves immortality, which is always a draw because everyone likes to think about living forever. It doesn’t actually involve time travel, but the film gives the feel of time travel by drifting back and forth between the past and the present and making them feel connected. The film also adds the idea of a contest to the death, which is always popular with audiences. This is a very smart combination of elements to get people to think about a film after they leave the theater. Moreover, the film is intelligent in how it reveals itself. This isn’t a film which rushes to tell the audience what is going on. For the first half hour, the film flips back and forth between 1986 and the past with little explanation. All the audience knows is that this man lives in both periods and there seems to be some society of sword fighters in modern New York City. It isn’t until Connery explains to MacLeod who he is that the audience is told what is happening. And even then, the story is still revealed through clues rather than a single moment of exposition. This is similar to films like those of Nolan or something like The Usual Suspects, something unheard of in 1986. To the contrary, most 1980s films would have a character (like Doc Brown in Back to the Future) explain the story right at the beginning of the film.

The film is well written too. There is a real economy of words, which makes the story tighter. Think of the line, “There can be only one!” This line encapsulates the entire contest between the immortals and it short circuits the need for pages of discussion to explain what is going on. It gives the audience a perfect understanding with a minimum of words and those words are like a catchphrase which the audience can adopt. Another example is MacLeod describing Ramirez as “you Spanish peacock.” Lesser writers would have used lines of dialog to try to create the same image of someone beholden to pomp. Even the bit characters work this way, like the hot dog vendor who asks the cops, while reading the paper, “What does ‘baffled’ mean? [laughs] What does ‘incompetent’ mean?” This is brilliant writing. Without this character even being part of the on-going discussion between the cops, and without any more than these two lines, this character explains to the audience that state of the police investigation. Again, entire scenes of discussion get condensed into two seemingly throwaway lines.

But therein lies the catch.

When I first published my books, I discovered a bit of a mystery. The overwhelming e-mails and reviews I got for the books were extremely positive. But mixed in were a series of people who really hated the books. And the criticisms they all gave made no sense to me. Specifically, they complained that the books “said nothing” about the characters’ motivations. Well, this is completely wrong. So I investigated. It turns out that a big chunk of the general public has been programmed to expect exposition. To them, unless the narrator says, “Bill was unhappy,” then they have no way to know if Bill is unhappy even if the character is described as frowning and even if another character says in the dialog, “Why are you unhappy?” Since discovering this, I’ve seen a similar issue in films, such as with Speed Racer. A big chunk of the audience simply is not able to understand context or to translate dialog into “the missing” exposition. Thus, the fact that Speed is haunted by the death of his brother is not something these people understand, because no character actually tells them, “Speed is haunted by the death of his brother,” even though it’s obvious throughout the film.

I think the same thing happened here. This film runs for about thirty minutes before you are told MacLeod is immortal, forty minutes before you are told who the Kurgan is (even though you’ve been watching his story), about an hour before the connection between New York City and the events in Scotland is made clear, and 98 minutes before you are told what the power is they are seeking. Even then, few of these things are spelled out in long single bursts of exposition. Thus, to understand this film, you need to actually think about everything you see and understand it from the dialog and the behavior of the characters. That doesn’t work with general audiences.

I am now wondering if this isn’t the difference between cult classics and other films. Perhaps, the reason cult classics are ignored by audiences in the first place, and then are strongly loved by the people who “get them,” is this issue. Perhaps, these are films general audiences simple can’t understand because they lack the generic exposition those audiences require? So a cult classic isn’t a bad film that finds a quirky audience, it’s actually a good film which the general public simply couldn’t understand.

Interesting.