Outlander

So, you know the story of Beowulf, right? He started killing monsters to make people think he was awesome, and eventually became the king, and he even killed a space dragon? Wait, I meant a regular dragon. That’s a weird typo! I… I may have shown my hand too quickly? In Outlander, see, there’s this guy from space, and he crash-lands because a couple of alien monsters screwed up his ship. And then he teams up with a bunch of vikings named Hrothgar and Wulfric and Boromir and Viking Kate Winslet and Erik, and they fight against the aliens and do things like be noble and dramatic and fall in love.

It’s a little hard to believe that this concept made it beyond the Sci-Fi channel’s weekend line-up, but the truth is, it’s more than good enough for that. As cheesy science fiction goes, it was pretty much top of the barrel. (I mean, it was still cheesy in a lot of ways, make no mistake!) It had a displacer beast! And an alien food bank! And a genocide sub-theme that ultimately seemed to come out in favor? Yeah, okay, I’m not too sure about that part either, but it was still a pretty awesome movie.

4 thoughts on “Outlander

  1. Chris Post author

    It was pretty fantastic. First, he’s all conflicted about how his people wiped out the displacer beast space dragons, but then the last one kills his wife and son and follows him to earth, and there’s suddenly no more talk about regrets or anything, and he pretty much kills the last one with a song in his heart, as best as I could tell.

    It may have been because Viking Kate Winslet was in danger, but he didn’t spend any time feeling conflicted afterward, either, so.

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  2. Mike Kozlowski

    See, I think you’re supposed to do that the other way around. First you wipe out the aliens, and then later you feel bad about it when they’re conveniently dead and there’s no possibility you’ll seriously have to try to forge a lasting peace with displacer beast spragons.

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  3. Chris Post author

    Well, they thought they’d got them all, right? And his conflictedness was in flashback form, after his family was dead but well before he completed the genocide. I think I would be okay with it from the revenge angle, since it’s not really about genocide, despite it being a visible consequence of the movie. But to show the conflict in the order they did, he comes off as pretty scuzzy at the end.

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