State of body	No, we’re not going to do the obvious joke, okay? It hasn’t had its head cut off. Just its brain.
Detail of inspection	Inspected twice.
Forensic Investigator	Jon
Comments	There’s been serious reconstructive work to put its body parts back where they belong, but they still don’t quite fit.

Ah, “Highlander 2″. Possibly one of the most legendarily bad big-studio movies ever made. A glimpse of a world in which no individual scene leads logically to any other. The only time I ever walked out at the end laughing and thinking “I paid six bucks for this?!” And yet… this was my first exposure to Highlander, and it intrigued me enough to make me tune in when the TV series came around. So, somehow, it interested me enough to make me a fan.

And I can’t help remembering the audience reaction. It was one of the most vocal I’ve ever heard, snickering and jeering at the screen… but there was also a moment when they *cheered*. (When a rejuvenated Conner MacLeod walked out of the flames.) And when they were *meant* to laugh, they laughed full-on… the sublime airplane-safety-video, or almost any of Sean Connery’s seventeen minutes onscreen in this film. (The “Renegade Edition” re-edit includes another random gem like this, a gleeful TV ad for “The Psychic Chef”.) And quite frankly, the visuals of the film look far more gorgeous than it has any right to — neat cinematography and camera movements, and the the special-edition DVD’s redone FX cover for some old-school-Doctor-Who moments in the original.

So there’s something in there, somewhere. The question is, could it be salvaged?

Well, if I didn’t think so, this would be a really short article.

Let’s start by going back to the basic premises we have to work from: A Highlander sequel, set in the future. The finaniciers say Sean Connery as Ramirez has to be in it, throughout the film, not just in a cameo — but you can only afford him for six days’ shooting, which means about 18 minutes of the film if you structure things right and keep him out of the elaborate battle scenes. The producers want an answer to “where did the immortals come from, and what’s the deal with the Game”. And it’s expected that the story’s all got to come down to a final swordfight which saves the world.

Let’s also assume, for the sake of this particular Game which Film Forensics plays, that we’re going to keep the general shape of the film we got, and the memorable set pieces… though hopefully we can fill in enough of the connective tissue that they’ll make something approaching sense. The origin flashbacks. The ozone shield which has saved the world but turned it into a fetid mess, and MacLeod’s part in setting it up. The girl who’s on a crusade to bring it down, the corporation that makes money from keeping it up. The immortal bad guy’s rampage on a subway train… sure, it’s an obvious attempt to re-do the Kurgan’s New York driving rampage , but it can be cool nonetheless. Even the aerial fight scene with flying immortals is a neat idea… though it would be kinda nice if we could justify *why* these guys are acting like cackling bird-creatures. Heck, we’ll even keep in the mini-version of “Fortress” with the attempted prison break. And pretty much all Connery’s material can be the same, because precious little of it has much to do with the plot.

Given all that, we’ve got a more specific challenge: keep the good material from the HL2 we got, but ground it in a story where the SF and fantasy sides of the story work together rather than at cross purposes.

Fans tend to focus on the fact that the film doesn’t feel enough like the original Highlander… and they blame the futuristic setting for that. I’d say that’s not a problem in itself — it’s a sign of director Russell Mulcahy’s praiseworthy ambition that he didn’t just want to tread the same ground a second time. In the special Renegade Edition (which I’m taking as the definitive version of the film, since it’s the closest to the events as scripted), we can see how what he’s doing is trying to capture the underlying approach of the original but put it in a new context. What made the original “Highlander” striking was the way it blended the urban sleaze of modern New York with epic historical fantasy… For Highlander 2, the urban world became Blade Runner-style grunge, and the past became Wagnerian legends. Tech noir meets opera. That’s not a bad idea in itself, and the Renegade Version opening sequence — in which an aged Conner MacLeod sits blankly in a run-down opera house in the year 2024, watching “Gotterdammerung” before dreaming of his own ancient mythical battles — shows how they were aiming to fuse the two. (It’s also a nice callback to the original film, which begins with a burnt-out MacLeod watching the staged shenanigans of pro wrestlers, before we’re led into his un-staged present and past battles.)

Some people say the whole idea of putting Highlander in a sci-fi setting was wrongheaded, but to me it seems reasonably natural — the Highlander concept is about living through the sweep of history, and history doesn’t stop sweeping in the present day. A future setting is also pretty much inevitable if you want to follow the original film and explore the idea of its hero finally growing old. Mulcahy was quoted as saying that he didn’t see HL2 as being sci-fi, so much as a period piece set in a future period. The final film doesn’t reflect that very much, but it’s a reasonable starting point.

There are, however, two big problems with the implementation of the scifi-lander idea. The biggest one is that there’s a SF side to the plot — the ozone shield — which has little or nothing to do with the idea of immortals whacking off each others’ heads. There’s a good _thematic_ connection — MacLeod saved the world twenty-five years ago, but now the world is run-down and worn-out in just the way our now-mortal hero has aged nearly to death. This story represents his chance to be rejuvenated and restore the world at the same time. But the problem remains, the motives of the villains behind the Shield Corporation have bugger-all to do with an eternal battle between good and evil, or with living forever. And the battle against the Shield Corporation is the closest thing to a throughline which the plot has — almost all MacLeod’s actions are directed against it rather than against his immortal adversary (about whom more later). The result is a massive grinding of gears between the fantasy movie they set up, and the sci-fi action movie we get.

So, point i) in a list of things to fix in HL2: Tie the sci-fi to the hi-fi.

The other big problem is the SF-ish explanation of one of those Highlander elements. Exploring the question of where the immortals came from is a natural question for a sequel… the producers have said that they didn’t realize that the fans didn’t actually want an answer to that. I don’t quite agree; I think the problem is that *this* answer is a wrong one.

Okay, brace yourselves. I’m going to have to mention the Z word now.

Even the producers have backed away from the idea that the immortals were aliens from the planet Zeist, exiled here after a failed rebellion, and immortal and superhuman compared to the locals. The name Zeist puts the idea right into the realm of tacky sci-fi rather than mythic fantasy. The Renegade Edition re-edit loses all the mentions of Zeist, instead grounding the origins of our characters in an unknown high-tech society “a long time ago” who exile criminals who have this unexplained immortality into the far future… but in the process it also cuts out most of the explanation of why any of this immortality stuff is happening, or what the hell the logic would be in setting up the whole duel-to-the-death Game thing to begin with.

Even more basically than that… saying the hero is from another world/dimension/whatever can still work as a fantasy backstory. Trouble is, it’s *Superman’s* backstory. It defines our hero as a guy who came here from somewhere else, whose superhuman powers are the result of his somewhere-else-ness, who isn’t really human even though he looks like one. And that cuts against the underlying _humanity_ of the Highlander idea — Conner MacLeod *isn’t* a superman, he is at heart an ordinary guy who just keeps on living. Yes, he’s a warrior, but he’s not a superhero — he doesn’t go around whacking off heads for the moral principle of the thing, he does it because he has to to survive. He doesn’t play the Game by choice. He just wants to get on with living and dying.

So why not abandon the entire idea of explaining where the immortals came from? Well… first up, because it’s one of the most obvious hooks left to explore in a sequel. And most basically because in order to have a sequel to the original Highlander, you need to explain why there are still more immortals fighting each other in our world when supposedly the Game is over and Conner won. To do that, you pretty much *have* to give more explanation of the reasons behind it all. Not just the *what* of the Game, but the *why* (which is a question which “Highlander 2″ seems singularly bad at answering even on a minute-by-minute level).

So point ii) in the list: we need is a concept for the origin of the immortals which allows them to retain their humanity. Their immortality is a kind of magic, but they are not in themselves magical beings; they’ve all lived and died as people.

As a digression… I remember reading somewhere that Gregory Widen’s original concept for HL2 was that the immortals were angels who’d been kicked out, and that MacLeod would end up fighting an incarnation of Satan for the prize of getting a place back in heaven. This idea suddenly makes a bit more sense of what they were going for with Zeist: not a groaningly literal Other Planet, but another world which these creatures have fallen from. The angel connection even sort of makes sense of the psycho bird-men… and the “distant past” rewrite in the Renegade Edition is a lot easier to swallow if you think of it in the Wagner sense, that they’re from the age of gods and heroes rather than a literal place on the planet.

(Oh, and when this idea was thrown out of Highlander, apparently Widen turned it into the film “The Prophecy”… and the skeleton of it is still there in HL2’s deleted scenes, in the original ending which had MacLeod using the Prize to float up into the air, snog the girl, and Quantum Leap back to Zeist with her. Which just goes to show, Highlander 2 could actually have been *even more* risible.)

Now let’s put the sci-fi aside and look at the fantasy. The biggest problem with the immortal side of the plot is the character of General Katana, supposedly the main villain, the despot who exiled Conner and company in the first place and is now coming to Earth to finish the job. The thing is… Complete plot randomness seems to follow this character around through the film. After waiting through the entire Game, and then another thirty-odd years after it ends, he decides to send two wacky bird-men immortal assassins to kill the decrepit old MacLeod. Why? (Even his henchbird points out that MacLeod will die on his own in a couple of weeks, and even Katana acknowledges that these two thugs are crap.) When this backfires spectacularly, he goes to Earth himself. Why? He arrives in our world, commits some sub-Kurgan urban mayhem on a subway (which made sense for someone who’d lived as a barbarian for 1200 years like the Kurgan, but hardly seems like an evil overlord kind of routine)… and then goes to a deserted warehouse and waits for MacLeod to find *him*. Why? When MacLeod does inexplicably show up, they fight, Katana sends him falling several stories on an out-of-control elevator, he has MacLeod at his mercy… and says “The game’s not over yet”, and leaves. WHY? Instead he goes to the Shield Corporation, roughs up its bosses, and takes over. For the love of God, WHY? It’s not like he uses their resources to track down MacLeod; MacLeod just happens to come after them (and it’s not as if Katana would know this was going to happen). Katana expresses no interest in what the Shield actually does, and doesn’t seem especially bent on world domination. Finally, after a couple more inconclusive confrontations, he kills off his Shield Corporation henchling and fights MacLeod to the death. His death. The end.

See the story problem? Even once you get past the general whathefuckery of Katana’s actions, MacLeod makes no action to battle this guy at all. Our hero is totally disinterested in fighting the villain which the film ostensibly wants him to fight, because he’s more interested in the Shield side of the plot.

Which brings us to point iii) on the wishlist: A villain who makes any kind of story sense.

(There’s also a point iv), which is ‘rather less in the way of witless dialogue’, but that’s not really the sort of story point we can address in a Film Forensics.)

So, with these three priorities — integrate the SF better, explain the immortals better, and have a less random bad guy — let’s see what we can do. Below I’ve put the synopsis of “Highlander 2: The Renegade Edition”, with my suggested changes in italics.

We open in the opera house; MacLeod dreaming of the mythical past. Identified onscreen as the dawn of time (as in “From the dawn of time we came…”), shown as an era of gods and monsters. He and Ramirez are leading a rebellion against General Katana (okay, so I don’t have a better name handy) and his army, which include some flying warrior-beast things. (Who do *not*, repeat *not*, act like Bill and Ted on crack.)

The rebellion fails, and MacLeod and the others are taken alive. They have their sentence explained to them: being executed is only the beginning. After they lose their heads, their very souls will be exiled from this world… and sentenced to gladiatorial combat. Katana’s into the mad-emperor arena thing in a big way. Once reborn, they will be pitted against each other in the largest arena imaginable — the mortal world across the centuries. The winner… well, he gets power over the mortal world, and a chance to live a human life and die in peace.

That’s the method by which we get these ancient magical figures into our world. Not space travel, not time travel, *reincarnation*. Conner MacLeod isn’t an exiled god himself; he’s a mortal man stuck with an immortal soul. That covers point ii).

MacLeod wakes up in the opera. He’s puzzled. Is this dream true? And if so, why is he only remembering it *now*? He heads home, and we begin to see the world he’s living in, under the Shield: a world as worn-out as he is. We establish that MacLeod has some connection to the Shield, and his old friend Alan Neyman, a senior man at the possibly corrupt Shield Corporation. He’s well-known enough that street toughs recognize him and back away with respect.

In the midst of this… he thinks he passes Katana on the street. Is he going mad? Is this some sort of near-death thing?

Intercut with MacLeod’s material… we follow “Katana” for a bit. He’s just an ordinary human, a blue-collar joe on the late shift, on his way home. Till he gets mugged. And knifed. Dying in a suitably chiaroscuro pool of his own blood.

And he *remembers*. Goes berserk. Leaps up and massacres the gang who just killed him. Psychotic glee: This morning I was a frustrated assembly-line worker, and now I’m a FUCKING IMMORTAL BARBARIAN WARLORD FROM THE DAWN OF TIME! YEAHHHHHH!

We get the subway rampage scene. It makes sense now, as a madman with his first taste of invulnerability.

Meanwhile, fetchingly wetsuited enviro-terrorist Louise Marcus leads a raid on Shield Control, in search of evidence that the UV level above the Shield is normal. Or perhaps she doesn’t, yet — it may be possible to move the action sequence to later and incorporate MacLeod. We don’t want to focus *too* much on the Shield stuff yet.

Cut this bit: Back in the past, Katana sends a couple of his crack-head bird-fetishist henchmen to modern Earth to kill MacLeod for some vague reason. See below for the replacement.

MacLeod has a really rather nice little scene in a bar with a bitter old woman who blames him for the world going to hell, which features MacLeod’s double-edged comment about “people who know when to stop”. She hits him with a beer bottle… and he sees the cut heal. Oh fuck, he’s immortal again. Play up the implications a little bit more, possibly through voice-over: Immortal at age eighty. Great. And this means that there are others of his kind around, so the Game’s back on… but how the hell did that happen?

Katana has tracked down a pair of other pre-immortals — cyber-skatepunks with 21st century hovering skateboards. (The same clunky-steel look as in the finished film. They don’t have to be alien flying tech — this is The Future, remember.) Once again, these guys *fail* to act like Bill and Ted on crack. Katana kills them both, and when they recover from that he recruits them as henchmen. Now they remember as well: they have the souls of a couple of his flying warrior creatures from the flashback. He sends them to kill MacLeod. (This way, if they don’t succeed, he can at least judge MacLeod’s strength.)

Louise Marcus finds MacLeod and tries to enlist him in the battle against the Shield Corporation. He’s got other things on his mind. The two skatepunks attack him, and we get the flying battle and two Quickenings as in the film… the first rejuvenates MacLeod, and the second Quickening goes to resurrect Ramirez at the place of his death.

(Note that, so far, the film is almost identical to what we got in the Renegade Edition, but with a few bits of clarified logic. The only significant additions have been the scenes establishing Katana and his henchmen as having origins in _this_ world, rather than arriving from space, as part of point ii).)

MacLeod, walking out of the flames after his victory, delivers the immortal line to Louise. “I am Conner MacLeod of the clan MacLeod… and I cannot die.” And then he screws her against the wall. NOT! We snip the most laughably ill-timed sex scene in modern cinema history and hold this development back for a while. What we do first, is bring the two sides of the plot into open conflict. He tells Louise about the Game — including that he doesn’t know why it’s restarted, and the fact that other unknown bastards are now after the Prize. He’s entirely focused on hunting and stopping them, to save Earth from an eternity of darkness under their rule. Hang on, interrupts Louise, take a look at the sky. We’ve already *got* an eternity of darkness, you helped give it to us. Never mind this mystical war thing — what are you going to do about this world, here, now?

Basically, we pull a bit of plot judo here — if the mystic-fantasy and urban-SF sides of the story are grinding against each other, we make *that* the keynote of the story. This is a guy who’s torn between two wildly different urgent tasks. And by pulling him into the SF plot rather than the fantasy war, Louise is again explicitly serving the function of reconnecting MacLeod to the world around him… we can see him heading back towards being the shut-down, singleminded, Gathering-obsessed figure he was at the beginning of the first film, until she intervenes. She’s guiding him to be a force for idealism, rather than just fighting blind. This way we serve point i) — the SF adventure becomes a reflection of the Highlandery themes of actually living in this world.

And *then* they do sex.

Cut this: Katana comes to Earth to take on MacLeod himself, and immediately goes on a rampage on the subway. The subway bit’s moved earlier in the story now. Then he goes to a deserted warehouse to wait for MacLeod to find him. No need for this now.

MacLeod goes to his late wife Brenda’s grave, and we get the flashback of her death — roasted by the ultraviolet, dying in hospital with countless others, telling him to do something about the world… prompting him to use his gifts to create the Shield. At this point in the story, this flashback both parallels the new relationship with Louise, and reaffirms his need to get involved.

And, since Brenda’s grave is on holy ground… Katana comes to find him there. Instead of just hurling insults at each other as in the existing film, though, this encounter advances our understanding of the situation. He’s calling MacLeod out, but MacLeod explicitly *doesn’t want to fight him* — he’s got another purpose in life. Katana has to drag him back into the Game, tugging his priorities back in the other direction. (We can keep Katana’s memorable comment on his sword from the existing scene: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. If you don’t take it out and use it, it’s going to rust.”)

The other function the holy-ground scene can serve, is to establish why the Game’s been restarted, and why Katana is here. Points ii) and iii) on our list. MacLeod figures it out… after the end of the Game in the first film, Katana was *deposed*. And he and his henchmen were sentenced to the same Game which they’d inflicted on so many themselves. Over the nearly forty years since the last Gathering, Katana and a number of his people have been born in our world… new immortals, as yet unbloodied. And when one of them (Katana) was the first one to die, that kickstarted the Game back into action.

The rules are slightly different this time: once they die, they know who they are and what they’re fighting for. The last one standing has a chance to leave the mortal world and return home.

Anyway, Katana makes MacLeod want to come after him, and as Louise wanders through the memories in MacLeod’s attic and the resurrected Ramirez wings his way towards them, MacLeod goes to the warehouse to fight Katana. And Katana kicks MacLeod’s butt. This is not what MacLeod has in mind. Katana ends up sending MacLeod crashing down umpteen stories on top of an elevator, reducing MacLeod to an oddly-shaped pile of limbs. But when MacLeod is at his mercy, he holds Katana off by telling him that if he kills him, he won’t get the Prize — MacLeod has done something clever with it, and if Katana kills him he’ll never know how to get it. And he’ll be stuck here forever. *That’s* what prompts Katana to withdraw.

So now we have a strong reason for MacLeod not to be engaging with Katana — he knows if he does, he’ll probably get his ass kicked — and to focus on the Shield Corporation subplot. And for Katana to pursue him, in the direction of the Shield Corporation. Point iii), his motivation, is hopefully looking a bit stronger now.

After another quiet moment or two back at his house — Louise talking about how she’d love to see a blue sky before she dies, and MacLeod telling her about his first and last wives — he goes to see his old friend Alan at the Shield Corporation. Alan’s the one good guy left on the board. Perhaps we move the sequence from earlier in the film, where Louise and her buddies sneak into Shield Control, to here — using MacLeod’s visit to Alan as a distraction. Once he’s with Alan, we flash back to the day he and Alan activated the Shield…

…and here we reveal the other new connection between the two sides of the plot. *The ozone shield is the Prize*. It was powered by the Quickenings, the life-essences of all the immortals slain over the years. On the day they launched the Shield twenty-five years ago, MacLeod plugged himself into the system, and all his accumulated gifts and energies went whooshing into the energy field which now protects the world.

This of course means it would be very very bad if Katana were to find this out, and take the shield down. Not only would an evil bastard have the power of all the immortals that ever lived, but taking all the Quickenings back would scorch the Earth. Even if the ozone layer is normal, shutting down the Shield in that way would be a catastrophe. We can explain all this in a subsequent scene between Conner and Louise.

So now we have point i) in place: all roads in the story lead to the Shield.

Alan tells MacLeod that the ozone layer has been restored, but they need to check by going above the Shield. He starts giving him the location of a service shaft in the mountains, but is interrupted by Sleazy Corporate Board Member before he can finish; MacLeod only gets the latitude, not the longitude. Possibly this hitch can be cut, as it only serves to motivate why they later have to rescue Alan before proceeding. That could be much more simply motivated: they need his knowledge to shut the Shield down safely. If so, then we proceed as in the original European Version of the film, and move the subsequent “climbing above the Shield” scene up here.

Sleazy Corporate Board Member busts Alan for leaking the information, and has him taken to detention. He also mentions that there’s not enough energy on Earth to take the Shield down without killing everyone. (This is a set-up for needing a Quickening to do it– but the explanations for it in the story make no sense. What kind of a safety feature is *that*? So, lose it.) Katana crashes the board meeting and takes over. He’s been shadowing MacLeod, and knows MacLeod is planning action against the Corporation for some reason, so he wants to lay a trap. Back at MacLeod’s home, Ramirez arrives, and they prepare to attack Shield Control. Louise gets word of Alan’s arrest, so they’ll have to get him out first. While the film has him in a separate maximum-security prison, I’d recommend having him in a top-secret detention block under Shield Control itself. Minimize the number of different castles these guys have to storm.

MacLeod and Ramirez storm the place with an incognito Louise as their hostage, and get “killed”. They revive, clobber some guards, sneak into the prison levels, and find Alan. Alan gives them the other half of the service-shaft coordinates (or, if we change things as above, the secret to shutting the Shield down safely) and dies. Katana and Sleazy Corporate Board Member have arranged a deathtrap: lock them in an impeller-fan chamber with descending blades which will behead them both. Ramirez saves them with a self-immolation — releasing his Quickening and destroying the fan. It doesn’t have to be quite so cod-magical — he can sacrifice his head to Conner and let the Quickening rip the hell out of the fan. MacLeod and Louise escape.

Katana attacks them on the way to the desert; they shake him off, go above the Shield, and discover that everything’s normal. As mentioned, this could be moved to earlier in the story; the attack by Katana is fairly gratuitous, but if he needs more of a presence in the film, then during his attack could be when he figures out that the shield is the Prize. If not, he can work it out during the raid on the prison/Shield Control.

MacLeod and Louse return to Shield Control (or, they never left) and go to the main power center. There, Katana is already trying to yank out the plug, grab the Quickenings and kill ‘em all. MacLeod challenges him, and they fight. MacLeod now has a better chance because he’s got Ramirez’s Quickening. But what tips the balance is Louise, successfully shutting the Shield down and releasing the Quickenings. This distracts Katana enough for MacLeod to gain the upper hand. Perhaps the Quickenings even take the form of vengeful ghosts, wanting to get back at Katana for everything he inflicted on them. Swish, thunk, zap, sizzle, the Shield goes down and we see a clear sky. Louise and MacLeod, each with a full measure of mortal life, wander off smooching.

So: with this we have a Highlander 2 with i) more emphasis on the Highlander side, and the SF material justified as part of the existing fantasy world; ii) a hopefully slightly more mythical take on the immortals which still allows them to retain their humanity, and iii) justifications for the villain’s (and indeed the hero’s) actions. (And it even has the potential for future sequels, if there are other pre-immortals currently on Earth who Katana never got to, or future exiles yet to be sent.) Would that be enough to turn this into a decent film? I may be deluding myself here… but given how much of an improvement the Renegade edit was already, it’s possible this might just be enough.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 14th, 2006 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Action, Fantasy, Forensic Analysis, H, Jon, Science Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.