Cinema: Outlander

So, a little while ago… I think it may have been two weekends ago, but I’m not really sure… Amy had some sort of extra long rehearsal or something, so Brandy and I decided to go to a movie. We had looked earlier at the movie list, and there wasn’t much that either of us thought was really all that exciting. I listed some I’d be “OK” with though. And when we actually got to the theater, Brandy spontaneously chose Outlander, most likely influenced by the exact time it was starting relative to what time it was.

In retrospect, this may have been a mistake.

OK, the basic premise of this movie, and pretty much as much as I knew going in, was that an alien crash lands amongst the medieval Vikings, and then things happen. In the first few minutes, the alien crashed, opened its helmet… and it was a PERSON. This wasn’t even a Star Trek style alien with bumps on its head. Just a generic person. I had been hoping for a movie sort of like ET, but set in the middle ages. No such luck.

Anyway, the first half of the movie was really bad. It seemed like nobody in the movie could act at all. There were a few words here and there and some grunting and fighting. Oh, and a dragon showed up. And of course the alien is going to save the village from the dragon and all. Of course.

Anyway, it was pretty bad. Laughably times at times, but not so much so that you actually enjoyed it because it was so bad.

I think Brandy retained this feeling through the whole movie. She was ready to walk out.

On the other hand, I thought the movie started to improve somewhat about half way through… right after they started giving some backstory on what had happened to the alien guy before he crash landed.

But I think the main thing is that they pretty much stopped even trying to do anything with the characters… there was no more getting to know the people or any of that stuff… they just started running around fighting the dragon. So just your normal sort of action and adventure thing with chases and fights and explosions and such. And OK, that stuff is usually not enough for me in a movie… I like to actually care about the characters some, and perhaps even think a little. But in this case, the constant running around and stuff at least meant that none of the people were trying to have conversations or really talk very much, which they weren’t very good at.

I did feel sorry for the dragon though. I actually ended up empathizing with the dragon more than any of the main characters. Poor dragon. You really wanted the dragon to win, because pretty much all of the humans sucked.

So, I doubt it is even still in the theaters, but if it is, save this for video… or not at all. You won’t miss it.