Last week, my partner showed me the trailer for the next film from Ian Ziering and the guys who did all those Sharknado films, a little flick they’ve dubbed ZOMBIE TIDAL WAVE. For those who haven’t seen it yet, I encourage you to take a look:
As fans of large chunks of the Sharknado franchise, we’re naturally excited about this film. It looks decidedly B-Grade and terrible, but at least 50% of the time this combination of actor and director have taken a terrible concept and made it into something far more interesting. They pushed the ambition of the film and played things straight, delivered above and beyond what was expected of them.
The other 50% of the time–I’m looking at you, Sharknado 4–they blew it by playing things for laugh.
I did a write up of what made a really good Sharknado films in my newsletter after we rewatched the series last year. It ran a little something like this:
I am known, among my friends, for complaining loudly about the fact that Sharknado 4 is the worst of the franchise because it finally gets silly. Peter, they tell me, it’s a series about shark-infested tornado, it’s already quite silly. It is. That’s part of what people love about the series: it’s terribly silly, terribly goofy, and altogether unrealistic. It’s also why I point people towards Sharknado one through four in order to study how silly concepts can be made to work as a narrative (and, weirdly, become a cultural phenomenon).
The key thing to look for, in the first few instalments of the franchise, are the way they handle internal consistence and establish the rules of the milieu. Once you accept that sharkando’s are possible, everything in the films make sense: people are killed by flying sharks and they are grieved; sharkando’s get worse in silly ways, but they are treated as threats with dire consequences; madcap, absurd solutions are offered, but they are merely a natural escalation of things that have worked before. More importantly, those solutions make sense in the broader genre of the monster movie and natural disaster movies, playing with tropes we already know and love.
This means, as a reviewer, you can suspend your disbelief while acknowledging the absurdity. Things are silly, but because the characters in the film respond to sharknado’s like they’re a serious thing, there is an internal chain of cause and effect that makes sense and escalates the sense of threat.
Sharknado 4 is the part of the franchise where they lose that, leaning harder on pastiche. Characters die, but they are not grieved and thus their deaths hold no emotional weight. The internal consistency of the film is broken in order to make way for parodies of other films, which means the characters are increasingly aware of the fact they’re in a fictional construct, even if they don’t acknowledge it as such.
The character’s no longer feel the threat because they are fictional constructs, which means the threat is no longer means something.
You can get away with incredibly silly concepts, so long as they’re taken seriously by the characters. It’s largely how I write fiction about killer mimes that float about on balloons, or cities laid waste by kaiju only half the world can see. The line between slapstick, absurd, and horror is largely one of internal integrity and the way character’s respond to what’s happening in the narrative.
I think about this kind of thing a lot because starting a goofy-but-serious horror franchise is on my bucket list of things to do with Brain Jar Press. It’s one of those projects that’s a long way out of my comfort zone as a writer, but the idea of taking an absolutely moronic idea and playing it as straight as I can appeals to me on all kinds of levels.
Of course, figuring out the kind of goofball combinations that result in title like Sharknado or Zombie Tidal Wave is an art all of its own.
So, let’s be clear: there are good superhero films, and there are okay superhero films, and there are atrocious superhero films. And then there is Green Lantern. The the Generation X telemovie and the first attempt to do a Justice League film in the nineties, and the version of Nick Fury, Agent of Shield staring David Hasselhoff. And then, somewhere at the tail end of that list, trashing Halle Berry’s career not long after she picked up a mother-fucking Oscar, there is Catwoman.
For me, the quality of the film doesn’t matter. I love comic books, I love superheros. To convince me that I should not only avoid such films, you basically have to attach Zack Snyder as a director and fuck things up for everybody by ignoring…well, basically anything that resembles a film.
In the realm of trashy movies, Catwoman is kind of glorious: a movie so goddamn bad that Halle Berry showed up at the Razzies to accept her award in person and hang some shit on the studio that made it. Because of this, I will sit down and watch it more often than is actually sane, and because I am a waste-not, want-not kind of guy, I will start looking for reasons to justify putting myself through this particular cinematic experience.
And, weirdly, if you pay close attention to Catwoman, there is actually some useful lessons for a writer to pull out of it. It’s like a cinematic what-not-do-do that hammers home some oft-repeated writing advice in a very visual, obvious way.
ONE: DON’T CHASE THE MARKET
Sam Raimi’s Spiderman hit cinemas in 2002 and basically blew away people’s perceptions of what a superhero film could be. Sure, there had been hits in the genre before, courtesy of the X-Men franchise, but for the most part pre-2002 movies featuring superheroes were…well, cheesy and often hampered by the limits of special effects. Also, slightly embarrassed by their source material.
But Raimi? Raimi hit it out the park, making the first-ever film to clear $100 million dollars in its opening weekend and earning a fair amount of crucial success.
Two years later, Catwoman hits cinemas and…well, let’s just say that if you watch Catwoman and Sam Raimi’s Spiderman back-to-back, you’re going to notice a lot of familiar narrative beats and set-ups.
Consider the respective plot-lines.
In Spiderman, Peter Parker is a shy, nerdy high-school student who is given superpowers by a genetically engineered super-spider, and must stop millionaire industrialist Norman Osborn after Osborn is given powers (and driven mad) by some experimental chemicals. Along the way, Peter discovers his true feelings for the girl-next-door and learns some bitter lessons about the responsible use of powers.
In Catwoman, Patience Phillips is a meek, slightly geeky type working for a cosmetic company who gains mystic cat-powers, and must stop cosmetic millionaire Laurel Hadare who has been given powers (and driven mad) by some experimental cosmetics. Along the way, Patience discovers her true feelings for the neighbourhood cop and…well, learns some lessons about the responsible use of powers. Kind of. As best you can, when you’re also meant to be an amoral catburglar.
I’m playing fast-and-loose with details here, but the similarities really do stack up as the films progress. You can literally hear Catwoman’s producers in the background screaming MORE LIKE SPIDERMAN, THAT SHIT MADE MONEY.
And they do it regardless of whether it makes any sense for the character of Catwoman, or the story that is being told. Beats from Spiderman are more-or-less shoehorned in for the sake of having them, and what works well in a coming-of-age story about a teenage geek doesn’t work anywhere near as well here.
Catwoman utterly fails to capture the success of Spiderman. And because it’s trying to hard to do so, it also utterly fails to be the interesting film that it could have been if someone had actually set out to make a Catwoman film.
Don’t chase the market just because something hit it big. Tell the story that makes sense for the character you’re writing about, and do the things that will make the story yours.
TWO: RESPECT THE AUDIENCE EXPECTATIONS
If you were at all familiar with Catwoman from the comics, you were probably baffled by the Catwoman film. The same is true if you were familiar with Catwoman from the Adam West Batman TV show, or Batman: The Animated Series, or Tim Burton’s Batman Returns take of the character from 1992.
Basically, Catwoman was a character who had been around for a while, in various incarnations, and the basic strokes were pretty-well established: amoral cat-burglar who flirts with Batman, wears a lot of leather, and uses a whip. She might not have the cultural cache of Superman, Batman, or Spiderman in terms of sitting in the public consciousness, but Catwoman was a character who had fans and expectations.
And while you don’t have to meet those expectations, it can behove any creator working with a particular established character or genre to figure out what it was people actually liked about said character/genre, and what they expect from a movie.
This is a particular talent, among writers. And somewhere, in an alternate universe, the folks who made the Catwoman movie probably did something sensible when they decided to reboot the character. They recognised that comics and superheroes weren’t a genre unto itself, but characters that fit into specific types of genre, and they worked accordingly. Let’s do a heist film, they said. Or let’s do a super-powered film-noir homage.
Essentially, let’s tell stories that fits with people’s core expectations about the character, because Catwoman is a pretty terrible character to use for a coming-of-age story, what with being, you know, adult. More specifically, an amoral adult that has a tendency to be highly sexualised, which just gets weird in a coming-of-age superhero narrative where you basically learn that with great power comes great responsibility.
If you’re going to tell a story, respect the expectations the audience is bring to it. We are attracted to certain types of stories because they deliver a particular experience, and audiences react poorly when the experience doesn’t mesh with their expectations.
It can take an otherwise good film (I’m looking at you, Die Hard with a Vengeance) and kill it dead because your ordinary-guy-against-the-world story has just gone all buddy cop. It can take an utterly atrocious film (I’m looking at you, GI Joe: The Rise of Cobra) and make it considerably worse, ’cause you’re not only bored, you’re feeling vaguely insulted.
Respect the audience expectations, even if you’re going to subvert them. Hell, especially if you’re going to subvert them. You don’t need to slavishly meet every audience demand when it comes to casting and narrative, but don’t cheat people of the experience they think they’re going to get.
Catwoman basically riffs off the Burton Batman films rather than the comics, in terms of it’s mythology, and that mythology worked fine in Burton’s films despite being utterly weird and insane, largely because the spirit of the character still came through. Catwoman was amoral. She was possibly insane. She was an anti-hero, in the end, and a natural counterpoint to Batman as a character driven by revenge.
The Catwoman in this movie is, theoretically, driven by the same revenge…were it not for the fact that she’s much more interested in getting into the pants of the male lead, despite the fact that someone killed her and mystic cats licked her back to life.
It’s…not a particularly satisfying take on the character, even with Benjamin Bratt doing his damnedest to be a credible Mary-Jane Watson.
THREE: AN UN-BUILT METAPHOR MEANS FUCK-ALL
There is the potential for an absolutely beautiful finale to Catwoman – one that could have been a great set-piece fight-scene that redeemed everything.
The set-up is simple: Catwoman confronts the villain of the film, Laurel Hedare, in the penthouse space where the old Hadare Cosmetics advertisements are stored in what I presume is meant to be a towering monument to her vanity.
I presume this, because they’re not actually something you see at any other point of the film. They’re just…there for the final fight, in this location we haven’t visited yet. If you’re really curious, and don’t want to watch the film, YouTube has you covered:
And I can totally see the metaphor they’re striving for. Laurel Hadare was the face of Hadare Cosmetics in all those old billboards, until she got older and turned to experimental cosmetics to try and preserve her beauty, only to discover that they turned her into a super-strong, indestructible monster instead. Catwoman confronts her and the two women fight among those old billboards, destroying these giant replicas of Hadare’s face as they brawl, talking about identity and masks as they go.
It should have been brilliant. Loaded with meaning and metaphor. The indestructible woman, who has been retreating from her humanity all film, destroying all these reminders of who she used to be. A hero who has been unnoticed in her ordinary life, and hiding her identity all film, finally getting the cathartic reveal of being seen.
It should have been a moment where we peeled back the onion skin layers of the character, via the medium of an action sequence. A real moment of tragedy when we empathise with the villain, even if we don’t like her.
Instead, it’s just…there. They fight amid old billboards that no-one has seen prior to this point in the film, and they trash them in an attempt to create meaning that no-one is willing to buy. The fight choreography is stale, and we’re reminded again that action means nothing without purpose and meaning behind it.
If you want to use a metaphor like this, you need to build it up for the audience. Given them a few scenes to register its importance before you start pulling it apart. There is the old rule we inherit from Chekhov: the gun that’s fired in the third act must appear on the mantle in the first.
The same applies to your big metaphors: put them in early, so that they mean something when you change them at the tail end of the story.
FOUR: SPEAKING OF VILLAINS…
Oh, Catwoman, no. Dear god, no. Laurel Hadare is a godawful villain. She is so cartoonishly evil she should be twirling a moustache. Poor Sharon Stone should be laughing maniacally and tying people to train tracks, not applying evil facial cream and trying to shoot people with a gun.
Partially this is because the story never commits to which painful stereotype they’re asking Stone to embody. She starts as the amoral corporate villain, releasing a dangerous anti-aging cosmetic for sale despite warnings about its dangerous side-effects; she becomes a jilted woman, murdering her husband after he abandons her as both the face of Hadare cosmetics and takes up with her replacement; she’s then…psychotic? Driven mad by her own use of the dangerous cosmetics? Terrified as her own disintegrating beauty?
Honestly, by the time we get there, I have so little faith in any scene that Hadare appears in that I am basically praying for the quick release of death. This is not the stuff great villains are made of.
I’m not taking aim at any of these stereotypes – any one of them could have been built into something with depth, if they had given Hadare screen-time to do anything more than deliver a line of god-awful dialogue.
It could have been made better by picking one core motivation and sticking with it, letting everything else stem from that single, fatal flaw that the film revolves around.
Consider, for example, Darth Vader in Star Wars – one of the great movie villains. He comes on screen with a single flaw that drives everything he does – arrogance – and this is reflected in every other named villain in the movie.
Imperial bad guys are arrogantly confident about their battle stations, their plans, their methods of control. They are the minor-league Vaders, giving us little object lessons about what happens when that arrogance meets a more powerful force (hint: it involves being force-choked), so that when Luke and Vader finally square off, we subconsciously know what’s going to happen.
Even better, Vader’s fatal flaw in the film is the thing Luke is struggling with. He wants to run away from his moisture farm and be great, a hero just like his father. He gets that opportunity – literally, running away to become a knight – and there’s scene after scene where his confidence is tested and he’s told to embrace humility. At every step he is humbled – in his training sequence aboard the falcon, when his eyes are covered; when he shoots his first tie fighter, and Solo warns him not to get cocky – and when he accepts that, and follows his mentor’s advice, he is rewarded with victory.
All this sets us up for the final moment of the film, so that when he finally embraces it for good and listens to Ben Kenobi’s whispered advice to trust the force instead of himself, we feel the hero triumphing over the boyish dream that was seeded way back in act one.
Vader and Skywalker are mirrors of one another – two men who need to learn the same lesson, and it’s the one who learns it who ends the movie victorious and the one who doesn’t that’s sent tumbling into space in a damaged tie fighter.
There is no mirroring between Catwoman and Hadare, although there could be with a little work (and, to be fair, there were plenty of writers who knew their shit on this film – I suspect it was there, at one stage, and got written out by the next draft).
Instead, the film is too busy trying to set up Catwoman’s love interest and hang the meaningful exchanges off him, using him as the mirror. could have been made to work, were it not for the fact that he’s not driving the plot, and so the attention is split again and again. There’s the ghost of the old idea interfering with the new focus.
And this is what’s really the problem with Catwoman: it’s villain feels too small. Hadare’s motivations are too pat and on-the-nose. We are told everything, and shown nothing. There is no mysteries to lure us forward, through the story, in the hopes of figuring out why they are like they are.
Similarly, using Bratt’s detective Lone as a foil is similarly weak, ’cause the moment you start a superhero film with the with great power riff, there is no tension is teasing that the hero won’t learn that lesson unless it’s done exceptionally well.
Depth matters, in an antagonist. It can be the dividing line between a good bad movie, and…well, Catwoman.
FIVE: AVOID THE LOW-HANGING FRUIT
If you are attempting to launch a female-lead comic book franchise, do not build your story around evil cosmetics and beauty without any apparent sense of irony.
The conversation about feminism and fandom wasn’t anywhere near as advanced back in 2004, but even then, I sat there thinking no, you’re fucking shitting me. This is what you came up with?
It’s not that you can’t do something interesting with that set-up, but it’s the most obvious of low-hanging fruit, which means you need to fucking surprise the hell out of the audience with every other aspect of your movie. You need to be on top of your fucking game. You can do anything if you’re smart about things, but that’s not this film.
If you’re not going to be on top of your game, at least pick an idea that won’t make everyone in the theatre roll their eyes at the obviousness.
At the very least, when you fuck up, people can respect the attempt.
I wanted to get that out of the way early, because it’s the films sequel that famously earns the franchise the vast majority of its grief. People remember the second Highlander film as this massively disappointing experience, an incoherent mess compared to its predecessor, and truthfully it is all those things, but to lay all the blame on the various sequels of the film is a little unfair.
You see, the first Highlander is godawful as well. Actually painful to watch, when you force yourself to sit down and pay attention to everything, rather than just tuning in for the bits you remember fondly.
This truly surprised me when we re-watched the film as part of the Trashy Tuesday movie series. Like most gents of a geeky persuasion, both my flatmate and I had seen the film when we were teenagers and remembered it being all kinds of awesome. There were sword fights. There was Queen. There were mother-fucking katanas of doom. We were actually looking forward to it, when it came up on the Trashy Tuesday list, ’cause we’d watched all kind of rubbish in the lead-up and needed a break.
And yet, I couldn’t quite look away. There are some things Highlander does pretty well, some things it does pretty poorly, and there’s an interesting tension running through a film that you once loved and now find yourself hating. Which is why I came back to it a third time, taking a closer look, in order to figure out what’s really going on.
ONE: THE GOLDEN AGE OF HIGHLANDER IS THIRTEEN
Lets be honest: I demanded far less of films when I was thirteen than I do at thirty-six. Back then, Highlander could have some well-choreographed sword fights, a Queen soundtrack, and a moderately compelling villain and it’d rate up there as one of the greatest cinematic experiences ever. “THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!” didn’t make much sense, but it rated up there with “THIS IS SPARTA” as a cinematic line that everyone remembered and quoted at appropriate moments.
And, hell, lets be honest: it didn’t even need the well-choreographed sword fights or the compelling villain. Getting Queen to do the soundtrack was probably enough for my thirteen year old self (thirteen isn’t just the age where you’re willing to overlook certain flaws in a movie, it’s also the age when Bohemian Rhapsody becomes the most awesome song ever).
There’s a reason the suck fairy seems to visit many of your favourite films from childhood and your teenage years. Partially its because you’ve grown more sophisticated in terms of what you’re looking for in a narrative. Partially it’s because the themes that resonated with you when you were young don’t hold much meaning now.
(And there are some films, if you don’t see them at the right age, you’re never going to get. The Goonies is one of them – I saw it for the first time as a thirty-three year old and it never resonated with me like it did for people who claim it as one of their favourite childhood films).
Your taste in movies change, is what I’m saying. The more stories you engage with, the more you learn about how they work, the more you demand from the things you really enjoy and the harder it is for nostalgia to carry you over the roughs pots.While the adult Peter watches the film and gets bothered by everything – the lack of plot, the terrible acting, the fact that swords seem to make cars and rocks explode every time they make contact – thirteen year old Peter would have been distracted by the music and figuring out the D&D stats for the Kurgan.
TWO: PEOPLE WILL FORGIVE A LOT IF YOU START STRONG AND END STRONG
The beginning of Highlander is pretty well thought out. Strong opening soundtrack; strong opening visuals with the wrestling set-up; quick cuts; minimal flashbacks; a fight scene that hints at the overall mystery at the core of the film, even if there are a couple of elements that are kind of laughable.
The ending of Highlander is pretty solid as well. A nice fight scene with the lives of MacLeod’s girlfriend at stake, with choreography spread across changing terrain, leading into a triumphant win for the protagonist and a big SFX lightshow and exploding windows. Basically, it feels like something meaningful happens, even if you’re not entirely sure what.
The middle? The middle is flashbacks and montages and flashbacks within a flashbacks; this endless succession of infodumping that most films would shudder to attempt, delivering swathes of back story in the least interesting way possible, breaking it up with the occasional sword fight.
Basically, the middle of this film is a fucking mess, but it’s bookended by scenes strong enough that you forgive it the slow parts. Start strong. Finish strong. Even if the middle of your story is pretty average, it’s these two parts that people remember the most.
THREE: HIGHLANDER IS A MYSTERY STORY
I mentioned last week that the narrative impulse behind Tokyo Drift is basically a coming-of-age tale; when you strip away the cars and the narrative trappings, it’s got the same narrative drive as The Karate Kid or, hell, films like Whip It.
When I sat down to re-watch Highlander for this post, I spent a lot of time trying to figure out two things: a) why is MacLeod the least-interesting character in the goddamn film, and b) what’s the narrative impulse behind the film?
Turns out the answer to both these questions is much the same: at it’s core, Highlander is essentially a mystery story (or a whydunnit, if you’re playing along with Blake Snyder’s Save the Cat). It’s just not terribly good at telling the kind of story it’s trying to tell.
How does this relate to MacLeod being dull? Bare with me. For starters, this isn’t entirely Lambert’s fault. All evidence in this film to the contrary, he can actually hold his own as an actor when required, but it’s never actually required of him by the script. Highlander is just one of those rare films where the protagonist doesn’t have a narrative arc; he doesn’t really change, as a character, in a meaningful way. He doesn’t make the moral choices I keep banging on about that make climax scenes effective.
In this respect, he’s much like the classic Film Noir detective, where the Sam Spades, JJ Gittes, and Phil Marlowe’s of the story are largely observers who sit at the heart of an unravelling mystery. The protagonist job is to be our stand-in, realising the ways in which social norms have been violated as the mystery unravels. They’re required to be cool and calm, effective at their job, but their not fundamentally changed by their experiences. They’re characters who already know that the world is a grim and grimy place, and the events in their stories merely confirm that.
The main thing that keepsthe narrative moving forward in Highlander is much the same: it’s peeling away layer upon layer of mystery surrounding the immortals and the Quickening and the Gathering. We see secret upon secret revealed. The film tries to dress this up by having the bits that aren’t flash-back revolve around a police investigation of MacLeod’s initial kill – but that’s not the mystery we’re really interested in. The mystery at the heart of Highlander isn’t a murder or a missing girl – it’s the question of who are the immortals and what happens after the gathering?
And this is why the middle of the film is rough, because instead of an investigation, we get an interminable number of fucking flashbacks that reveal little bits and pieces of how Connor MacLeod became an immortal and yet understands very little about what all this means. In a detective story these scenes would be the result of our protagonist proactively investigating what’s going on; in Highlander they’re just…there.
What separates the mystery of Highlander from its narrative cousins like The Big Sleep, All the Presidents Men, Blade Runner, and Chinatown is the nature of the mystery and the way it unfolds, and make no mistake, it’s a pale shadow of those films in terms of its revelations. The way it unpacks information is clumsy, at best, and on-the-nose, at worse.
All of which requires Connor MacLeod to be a moderately dull character, because he’s the guy whose serving as the stand-in for the audience. The guy who needs to seem as normal as possible, who needs to dream small, to feel the pain of living forever in very human ways, so that the possibility of dying actually seems like a win when he finally wins it.
This isn’t an easy thing to pull off, but it’s because Connor MacLeod is so bland that the film gets away with the flamboyant mentor figure, Ramirez, and the cartoonishly evil villainy of The Kurgan. They are the most-definitely-not everymen that counterbalance the audience stand-in MacLeod, showing us what could happen if the mystery shakes out in a different way.
And yet, I constantly find myself wondering how much better this film would have been if the flashbacks revolved around Connor seeking these motherfuckers out in order to find answers, rather than patiently waiting in his Highland home for more experienced immortals to come drop some fucking knowledge on him to advance the whydunnit plot.
FOUR: “HAVING FUN” TRUMPS “RULE THE WORLD” IN BADGUYVILLE
You can get away with a lot if you’ve got a strong and memorable antagonist, and Highlander gets away with a lot: bad acting; bad dialogue; bad world-building; terrible FX; swords that ’cause things to blow up. But we forgive it because the Kurgan, despite his thread-bare motivation, has a distinctive look and the temerity to actually have fun with his immortality, and this makes him remarkably effective as an antagonist.
One of the most common pieces of advice writers get is the antagonist must believe they’re the protagonist of their own story, but there far more to a good villain than that. The Kurgan becomes a great villain, not because he’s convinced that he’s really a good guy, but because he’s so focused in his villainy. He’s not running around talking about how he’ll be the last man standing and take over the world; he’s doing this shit ’cause there’s no-one to stop him.
In short, he’s the guy most people probably would be if granted immortality, which is why we’re rather glad he’s not going to win. This makes him far more memorable than he’d be if he were psychotic for its own sake, or firmly convinced of a grand destiny, and keeps him on par with MacLeod in terms of his long-term planning ability.
Believing in themselves is a great trait for an antagonist. Having fun with their role is decidedly underrated, and few writers seem embrace that particular trait.
FIVE: IF YOU HAVE A SECRET CULTURE RUNNING LIVING THROUGH CENTURIES, MAKE THEM A LITTLE SUBTLE
I have no fucking idea how the immortals of Highlander have survived hundreds of years without being discovered. Going by their actions in this film, they’re remarkably shit-house at hiding their presence from people, particularly in the modern age where there is law enforcement and forensics.
These are the kind of people who stab one-another and leave the weapons beside the body, who get into duels and forget to die, and who pick up women by stabbing themselves in the chest and not dying.
They have magic, rock-exploding swords. They kill one-another and blow out every fuse in a three-block radius.Even the way MacLeod interacts with cops is belligerent and designed to attract attention.
For people who live in secret, they’re remarkably lacking in subtlety. And somehow no-one ever notices. This is one of those things that I’m willing to overlook at thirteen, but actually distracts me as an adult. It’s one of those world-building elements that distracts me fro the story.
SIX: TRUST YOUR AUDIENCE
For all its fault – and there’s a few – Highlander does one thing exceptionally well: it trusts the audience to “get it.”
There’s all manner of weirdness thrown at people through the film, from the immortals to the Quickening to The Gathering, stuff that’s thrown out there and given just enough context for people know that there’s something happening without ever giving a detailed explanation. It trusts you to interpret, rather than explains, which invites the audience into the process of constructing the world.
Writers and film-makers alike tend to get very caught up in their creations, forgetting that story is an inherently collaborative process. It’s one of the reasons phrases like show, don’t tell become part of the advice that gets dolled out to writers, even if it’s rarely put in context. It’s also an art that’s lost in contemporary Hollywood, where films get focused grouped into explaining everything to the lowest common denominator.
Highlander isn’t perfect in this respect – pretty much every time Sean Connery opens his mouth, he’s telling us some background detail – but it still gives away remarkably little, focusing on just enough information to give the action meaning. It’s a delicate balance, but one that’s worth studying and learning how to deploy.
