While it’s true that we’ve complained about the Highlander movies before, we were talking recently about them and a few questions came up. This put the idea in our heads to post an entry here for each of the Highlander movies detailing at least some of the myriad problems with these movies.
For the most part, Highlander was a pretty good movie, but, paraphrasing the film’s most famous line, “There should have been only one”.
The movie stood well on its own and told a really cool story about a race of Immortals who could only be killed by being beheaded. At the time of “The Gathering”, there would be a major showdown between all Immortals until there was only one left. That one remaining Immortal would receive “The Gift” – which turns out to be the ability to hear the thoughts of everybody, everywhere.
Here are some of the questions we have about this otherwise pretty good movie:
- Connor McCleod (Christopher Lambert) didn’t know he was an Immortal until Ramirez (Sean Connery) showed up and told him about the Immortals, the fact that he (McCleod) was one, and about The Gathering. It’s safe to assume that McCleod wasn’t some sort of brain damaged Immortal and that at some point each of the Immortals had to have this explained to them. So, how did the first Immortal learn this, with nobody to spoon-feed him the (and the audience) that information?
- How did Ramires know where to find McCleod? Did he have some sort of compass that always pointed to newfound Immortals?
- Juan Sánchez Villa-Lobos Ramírez (Sean Connery) tells McCleod that he was born in Egypt in 898B.C. If that is the case, why doesn’t he look Egyptian? Were his parents immigrants?
- If Ramirez is Egyptian, why does he have a Spanish name?
- Whether Ramirez is Egyptian or Spanish, why does he have an English accent?
- How long can one human being listen to every thought of everyone on the planet before he goes stark, raving mad?
Those are most of the questions this movie left us with. While there are more, we’d have really appreciated it if the movie had at least answered these.
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