Outlander

DVD review (region 2)
Directed by Howard McCain
Starring James Caviezel, Sophia Myles, Jack Huston, Ron Perlman, John Hurt
Release date 31 August 2009 (UK)

Norway, 709AD. A warrior named Kainan (Caviezel) crawls out of his crashed spaceship and sets out to hunt down a creature known as the Moorwen. When Kainan comes across a Viking tribe, including elder Rothgar (Hurt), his daughter Freya (Myles) and respected warrior Wulfric (Huston), they don’t believe his tall stories. But eventually they team up to put a stop to the creature’s bloody rampage…

Half the fun of watching this truly ludicrous sci-fi actioner is in ticking off the various movies it cribs from. The chic Vikings from Pathfinder and The 13th Warrior! The low-tech community under attack from Alien 3! The swimming aliens from Alien: Resurrection! The stealth-stalking from Predator! Hell, it even poaches from Pitch Black, which itself poached heavily from the Alien movies.

As you’ve probably guessed, Outlander is not an original movie, despite the pleasingly simple aliens vs Vikings pitch. But as big, dumb, unpretentious fun it certainly does the trick, with director Howard McCain delivering a stream of pulpy dialogue and violent kills while resisting the Jerry Bruckheimer school of ultra-stylisation.

McCain has obviously watched Aliens enough times to realise it’s smart to hold back before showing us his monster, and so it’s a good hour before the Moorwen appears in all its glory (and instantly becomes less frightening). In the meantime, McCain and co-writer Dirk Blackman are just as keen to depict everyday life in the Viking community and to develop the likeable, if fairly silly, characters. The rivalry-then-bonding between Kainan and Wulfric is especially nicely built up, culminating in a fun set piece in which Wulfric challenges the newcomer to a game of ‘walking the shields’ (you just know that this unusual skill will come in handy later).

There are underlying themes about mankind’s rapacious pillaging of resources and destruction of other cultures (an intriguing flashback reveals that Kainan’s race basically ethnically cleansed the Moorwens’ planet in order to settle there), but it’s difficult to take anything in Outlander too seriously. We can just about accept that English substitutes for Norwegian and a high-tech device allows Kainan to speak the same language as the locals. But it’s rather more difficult to accept the random hodgepodge of various accents, including a charmingly hammy Ron Perlman as an Irish (?) rival Viking chieftain and a horrible all-American kid who Kainan befriends (Newt in Aliens being the only non-annoying kid in an adult SF film – fact!).

Outlander is essentially a fun B-movie blessed with a reasonably-sized budget that allows for epic New Zealand locations and decent special effects courtesy of the geniuses at the Weta Workshop. It’s a little overlong, but this is a much more likeable prospect than either the po-faced Pathfinder or Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem. Matt McAllister

VERDICT: 6/10
Neither the disaster that the Weinsteins’ dithering over distribution would suggest nor the undiscovered genre classic that some fans are claiming, Outlander does provide plenty of daft thrills.