Outlander (film)
Encyclopedia
Outlander is a 2008
2008 in film
This is a list of all major films made in 2008.-Highest-grossing films:Please note that following the tradition of the English-language film industry, these are the top grossing films that were first released in the USA in 2008...

 science fiction film
Science fiction film
Science fiction film is a film genre that uses science fiction: speculative, science-based depictions of phenomena that are not necessarily accepted by mainstream science, such as extraterrestrial life forms, alien worlds, extrasensory perception, and time travel, often along with futuristic...

 directed by Howard McCain and starring James Caviezel
James Caviezel
James Patrick Caviezel, Jr. is an American film actor, usually credited as Jim Caviezel. He is known for the roles of Jesus Christ in the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, Bobby Jones in Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, Detective John Sullivan in Frequency, Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte...

. Caviezel has described Outlander as a light combination of Braveheart
Braveheart
Braveheart is a 1995 epic historical drama war film directed by and starring Mel Gibson. The film was written for the screen and then novelized by Randall Wallace...

and Highlander
Highlander (film)
Highlander is a 1986 fantasy action film directed by Russell Mulcahy and based on a story by Gregory Widen. It stars Christopher Lambert, Sean Connery, Clancy Brown, and Roxanne Hart. The film depicts the climax of an ages-old battle between immortal warriors, depicted through interwoven past and...

.

Plot

The story begins when a spacecraft tears through the atmosphere and streaks across the sky, crashing into a Norwegian lake in 709 AD. From the wreckage emerges Kainan, a soldier from a faraway planet, and a deadly alien stowaway called a Moorwen. Before he has a chance to track down the alien, Kainan, the Outlander, is captured by a Viking warrior named Wulfric and held prisoner in the local village led by King Rothgar. Gradually, as the Vikings come round to believing his story about "hunting a Dragon", and after he saves the King's life, he is accepted into their society. Flashbacks reveal his history where man and monster both seek revenge for violence committed against them: Kainan's people came to the Moorwens' world, killing them all and claiming it for themselves. One Moorwen survived, however, and slaughtered all the colonists, including Kainan's wife and son, after the armed forces had left.

As the Moorwen "Dragon" ravages the Viking lands, killing everything in its path, Kainan forms an alliance with the primitive but fierce warriors. Shortly after Kainan crash landed, the Moorwen devastated the rival village, triggering war, with its surviving warriors led by King Gunnar. King Gunnar assaults Kainan's village, but his forces are repulsed. The enemy Vikings retreat into the forest, the Moorwen strikes, leaving the Vikings no choice but to run back to their former foes for refuge. Together, the two sides attempt to destroy the Moorwen and its newly spawned offspring. The village takes massive casualties, including both of the tribal kings. With the warriors demoralized, most of the Vikings leave the village in search of a new home and safety.

Kainan, his friends, and the King's feisty daughter Freya, stand together to destroy the Moorwen. Kainan assists the Vikings by salvaging pieces of his crashed spacecraft allowing the forging of weapons capable of harming the creature. After a harrowing journey, the Vikings and Kainan confront the Moorwen in caves under the village and finally defeat the alien monsters. Only Kainan and Freya survive. As the movie ends, Kainan destroys an emergency beacon triggered when his ship crash-landed, deciding to remain on Earth rather than return home. He buries Rothgar and Wulfric, marries Freya and becomes the new King of the tribe.

Cast

  • James Caviezel
    James Caviezel
    James Patrick Caviezel, Jr. is an American film actor, usually credited as Jim Caviezel. He is known for the roles of Jesus Christ in the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, Bobby Jones in Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, Detective John Sullivan in Frequency, Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte...

     as Kainan
  • Sophia Myles
    Sophia Myles
    -Early life:Myles was born in London. She is the daughter of Jane, who works in educational publishing, and Peter Myles, a retired Anglican vicar in Isleworth, west London. Her maternal grandmother was Russian, and she refers to herself as "half-Welsh, half-Russian". She grew up in Notting Hill,...

     as Freya
  • Jack Huston
    Jack Huston
    Jack Alexander Huston is an English actor. Huston had a starring role in Neighborhood Watch and filmed Outlander with James Caviezel and Sophia Myles...

     as Wulfric
  • John Hurt
    John Hurt
    John Vincent Hurt, CBE is an English actor, known for his leading roles as John Merrick in The Elephant Man, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Braddock in The Hit, Stephen Ward in Scandal, Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York...

     as Rothgar
  • Ron Perlman
    Ron Perlman
    Ronald N. "Ron" Perlman is an American television, film and voice over actor. He is known for having played Vincent in the TV series Beauty and the Beast , a Deathstroke figure known as Slade in the animated series Teen Titans, Clarence "Clay" Morrow in Sons of Anarchy, the comic book character...

     as Gunnar
  • James Preston Rogers as Bjorn
  • Aidan Devine
    Aidan Devine
    Aidan Devine is a Canadian film actor. He was born in England and immigrated with his family to Canada at the age of 15. He studied at Dawson College's Dome Theatre in Montreal, Quebec and began his acting career in Montreal. He would later relocate to Toronto. His 1993 breakout role came in...

     as Einar
  • Cliff Saunders
    Cliff Saunders
    Cliff Saunders ' is an American sports radio personality based in St. Louis, Missouri. Cliff is the co-host of the St. Louis Rams Post Game Show on 101 ESPN...

     as Boromir

Production

Director
Film director
A film director is a person who directs the actors and film crew in filmmaking. They control a film's artistic and dramatic nathan roach, while guiding the technical crew and actors.-Responsibilities:...

 Howard McCain was inspired to write Outlander in 1992 when he was a student in Tisch School of the Arts
Tisch School of the Arts
Tisch School of the Arts is one of the 15 schools that make up New York University ....

 at New York University
New York University
New York University is a private, nonsectarian research university based in New York City. NYU's main campus is situated in the Greenwich Village section of Manhattan...

. He had seen an issue of Archaeology
Archaeology (magazine)
Archaeology is a bimonthly mainstream magazine about archaeology, published by the Archaeological Institute of America. Its focus is both for archaeologists and non-specialists alike. The magazine was launched in 1948, and is published six times a year....

magazine that had a rebuilt Viking
Viking
The term Viking is customarily used to refer to the Norse explorers, warriors, merchants, and pirates who raided, traded, explored and settled in wide areas of Europe, Asia and the North Atlantic islands from the late 8th to the mid-11th century.These Norsemen used their famed longships to...

 boat on the cover and conceived of a story based on the epic poem Beowulf
Beowulf
Beowulf , but modern scholars agree in naming it after the hero whose life is its subject." of an Old English heroic epic poem consisting of 3182 alliterative long lines, set in Scandinavia, commonly cited as one of the most important works of Anglo-Saxon literature.It survives in a single...

. Since a monster in Viking times did not seem convincing to McCain at the time, he shelved the idea until 1998. That year, McCain met Dirk Blackman, an experienced Hollywood screenwriter who studied at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

, who re-designed the story to carry science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 elements and re-identified the characters to distance them from their Beowulf origins. According to McCain, director Renny Harlin
Renny Harlin
Renny Harlin is a Finnish-American film director and producer. He is best known for Die Hard 2 , Cliffhanger , The Long Kiss Goodnight and Deep Blue Sea...

 expressed interest in making Outlander at one point. Eventually, Outlander was financed independently to have its effects designed by Weta Workshop
Weta Workshop
Weta Workshop is a special effects and prop company based in Miramar, New Zealand, producing effects for television and film.Founded in 1987 by Richard Taylor and Tania Rodger as RT Effects, Weta Workshop has produced creatures and makeup effects for the TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys...

 and to be filmed at the South Island
South Island
The South Island is the larger of the two major islands of New Zealand, the other being the more populous North Island. It is bordered to the north by Cook Strait, to the west by the Tasman Sea, to the south and east by the Pacific Ocean...

, New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

. Development was a struggle at first, but in 2004, production company Ascendant Pictures and producer Barrie M. Osborne
Barrie M. Osborne
Barrie M. Osborne is an American movie producer, executive producer, production manager and director.Osborne was born in New York City, New York, the son of Hertha Schwarz and William Osborne...

 gave McCain and his crew the necessary support to resume.

In May 2005, The Weinstein Company
The Weinstein Company
The Weinstein Company is an American film studio founded by Bob and Harvey Weinstein in 2005 after the brothers left the then-Disney-owned Miramax Films, which they had co-founded in 1979...

 announced the addition of the sci-fi epic Outlander to its distribution slate with Howard McCain directing the film. At the time, actor Karl Urban
Karl Urban
Karl-Heinz Urban is a New Zealand actor.He is known for playing Éomer in the second and third installments of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy in the 2009 film Star Trek and Julius Caesar on Xena: Warrior Princess...

 was in talks to star in the film, which is based on a screenplay written by McCain and Dirk Blackman. In September 2006, James Caviezel
James Caviezel
James Patrick Caviezel, Jr. is an American film actor, usually credited as Jim Caviezel. He is known for the roles of Jesus Christ in the 2004 film The Passion of the Christ, Bobby Jones in Bobby Jones: Stroke of Genius, Detective John Sullivan in Frequency, Edmond Dantès in The Count of Monte...

 was announced to star in Outlander, replacing Urban in the role. Filming was scheduled to begin October 16, 2006 in Halifax and Nine Mile River, Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia
Nova Scotia is one of Canada's three Maritime provinces and is the most populous province in Atlantic Canada. The name of the province is Latin for "New Scotland," but "Nova Scotia" is the recognized, English-language name of the province. The provincial capital is Halifax. Nova Scotia is the...

, and to last 10 weeks. Filming was also done at the Bay of Islands, Newfoundland
Bay of Islands, Newfoundland and Labrador
The Bay of Islands is an extensive inlet located on the west coast of the island of Newfoundland, in Canada. The Way Office was established on July 1, 1883. The first Waymaster was Thomas Carter.It is also a sub-basin of the Gulf of St...

, which was found by a production designer who looked at photos of Newfoundland's west coast after rejecting scouted locations New Zealand
New Zealand
New Zealand is an island country in the south-western Pacific Ocean comprising two main landmasses and numerous smaller islands. The country is situated some east of Australia across the Tasman Sea, and roughly south of the Pacific island nations of New Caledonia, Fiji, and Tonga...

 and British Columbia
British Columbia
British Columbia is the westernmost of Canada's provinces and is known for its natural beauty, as reflected in its Latin motto, Splendor sine occasu . Its name was chosen by Queen Victoria in 1858...

. The bay possessed an inlet
Inlet
An inlet is a narrow body of water between islands or leading inland from a larger body of water, often leading to an enclosed body of water, such as a sound, bay, lagoon or marsh. In sea coasts an inlet usually refers to the actual connection between a bay and the ocean and is often called an...

 that simulated part of a fjord
Fjord
Geologically, a fjord is a long, narrow inlet with steep sides or cliffs, created in a valley carved by glacial activity.-Formation:A fjord is formed when a glacier cuts a U-shaped valley by abrasion of the surrounding bedrock. Glacial melting is accompanied by rebound of Earth's crust as the ice...

 for the film. The conceptual design of Outlander was shaped by Iain McCaig, whose Ninth Ray Studios helped set up concept art
Concept art
Concept art is a form of illustration where the main goal is to convey a visual representation of a design, idea, and/or mood for use in films, video games, animation, or comic books before it is put into the final product. Concept art is also referred to as visual development and/or concept design...

, storyboard
Storyboard
Storyboards are graphic organizers in the form of illustrations or images displayed in sequence for the purpose of pre-visualizing a motion picture, animation, motion graphic or interactive media sequence....

ing, animatronics, and set design. Sophia Myles
Sophia Myles
-Early life:Myles was born in London. She is the daughter of Jane, who works in educational publishing, and Peter Myles, a retired Anglican vicar in Isleworth, west London. Her maternal grandmother was Russian, and she refers to herself as "half-Welsh, half-Russian". She grew up in Notting Hill,...

, Ron Perlman
Ron Perlman
Ronald N. "Ron" Perlman is an American television, film and voice over actor. He is known for having played Vincent in the TV series Beauty and the Beast , a Deathstroke figure known as Slade in the animated series Teen Titans, Clarence "Clay" Morrow in Sons of Anarchy, the comic book character...

, John Hurt
John Hurt
John Vincent Hurt, CBE is an English actor, known for his leading roles as John Merrick in The Elephant Man, Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four, Mr. Braddock in The Hit, Stephen Ward in Scandal, Quentin Crisp in The Naked Civil Servant and An Englishman in New York...

, and Jack Huston were cast alongside Caviezel in the film, which wrapped up photography on January 5, 2007 in Halifax and Newfoundland
Newfoundland and Labrador
Newfoundland and Labrador is the easternmost province of Canada. Situated in the country's Atlantic region, it incorporates the island of Newfoundland and mainland Labrador with a combined area of . As of April 2011, the province's estimated population is 508,400...

. Costume designer Debra Hanson designed by hand costumes for the main characters using designs from Ninth Ray Studios. She also provided leftover costumes from her previous collaboration, Beowulf & Grendel
Beowulf & Grendel
Beowulf & Grendel is a 2005 film loosely based on the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf. Filmed in Iceland and directed by Sturla Gunnarsson, it stars Gerard Butler as Beowulf, Stellan Skarsgård as Hrothgar, Ingvar Eggert Sigurðsson as Grendel and Sarah Polley as the witch Selma...

, to dress the extras. Actor Patrick Stevenson, who plays the superstitious Viking Unferth, studied pagan gods
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....

, the Norse god Thor
Thor
In Norse mythology, Thor is a hammer-wielding god associated with thunder, lightning, storms, oak trees, strength, the protection of mankind, and also hallowing, healing, and fertility...

, and runestones for his character.

For the character Kainan, director Howard McCain sought an actor that would be "a person with soul" and convey the character strongly, placing performance at the action part of the character second. The director chose Caviezel to fit the criteria. McCain saw James Caviezel's American accent as Kainan as a way to distance the character from the Vikings, whose actors had European accents. The director chose for Kainan to speak an alien language before adapting to the Vikings' language, which would be spoken in English for film audiences' sake. Old Norse
Old Norse
Old Norse is a North Germanic language that was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and inhabitants of their overseas settlements during the Viking Age, until about 1300....

 was the alien language selected for Kainan to speak, and James Caviezel was trained to speak the language by a linguistics professor from Iceland
Iceland
Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...

. Kainan's opponent, the creature called the Moorwen, was designed by creature designer Patrick Tatopolous for free for McCain's film. The Moorwen was a play on the word Morlock
Morlock
Morlocks are a fictional species created by H. G. Wells for his 1895 novel, The Time Machine. They dwell underground in the English countryside of 802,701 AD in a troglodyte civilization, maintaining ancient machines that they may or may not remember how to build...

 from H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells
Herbert George Wells was an English author, now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was also a prolific writer in many other genres, including contemporary novels, history, politics and social commentary, even writing text books and rules for war games...

' The Time Machine
The Time Machine
The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895 for the first time and later adapted into at least two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It indirectly inspired many more works of fiction...

. The director and the creature designer created the Moorwen to be like an animal, only to be perceived as a monster by those who were threatened. McCain praised Tatopoulos: "He brought the right amount of fierceness, sensuality, the sense of personality and a sentient kind of intelligence to [the Moorwen] that was perfect." The creature was designed to possess bioluminescence
Bioluminescence
Bioluminescence is the production and emission of light by a living organism. Its name is a hybrid word, originating from the Greek bios for "living" and the Latin lumen "light". Bioluminescence is a naturally occurring form of chemiluminescence where energy is released by a chemical reaction in...

, using light to draw its prey.

For the film, McCain constructed a replica Viking village and a replica Viking ship. The ship was modeled after the Oseberg ship
Oseberg ship
The Oseberg ship is a well-preserved Viking ship discovered in a large burial mound at the Oseberg farm near Tønsberg in Vestfold county, Norway.-Burial mound:...

 scouted at the Viking Ship Museum in Oslo
Oslo
Oslo is a municipality, as well as the capital and most populous city in Norway. As a municipality , it was established on 1 January 1838. Founded around 1048 by King Harald III of Norway, the city was largely destroyed by fire in 1624. The city was moved under the reign of Denmark–Norway's King...

. The museum's ship is 77 feet, which McCain shortened by ten feet in designing the dimensions for his film's ship for easier transportation. The ship was deployed at Little Port, Newfoundland and later burned for a scene - the remains are still on display in the community of Lark Harbor Newfoundland. The Viking village itself was built at the Nine Mile farm in Nova Scotia. The crew logged their own trees and hired a logging crew and truck for constructing a parapet
Parapet
A parapet is a wall-like barrier at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony or other structure. Where extending above a roof, it may simply be the portion of an exterior wall that continues above the line of the roof surface, or may be a continuation of a vertical feature beneath the roof such as a...

 800 feet in length and 20 feet tall. The village took three months to build. The village included long house
Long house
A longhouse or long house is a type of long, proportionately narrow, single-room building built by peoples in various parts of the world including Asia, Europe and North America....

s and a shield hall.

Critical reception

The film received mixed reviews. The film holds a rating of 40 out of 100 on the web site Metacritic
Metacritic
Metacritic.com is a website that collates reviews of music albums, games, movies, TV shows and DVDs. For each product, a numerical score from each review is obtained and the total is averaged. An excerpt of each review is provided along with a hyperlink to the source. Three colour codes of Green,...

, which indicates "mixed or average reviews", based on 11 reviews.

Ray Bennett of the The Hollywood Reporter
The Hollywood Reporter
Formerly a daily trade magazine, The Hollywood Reporter re-launched in late 2010 as a unique hybrid publication serving the entertainment industry and a consumer audience...

 said about the film, "it's entertaining nonsense with major league special effects, larger-than-life characters and inventive monsters that draw on the 'Aliens' and 'Predator' models, being terrifying but also vaguely sympathetic."
Derek Elley of Variety
Variety (magazine)
Variety is an American weekly entertainment-trade magazine founded in New York City, New York, in 1905 by Sime Silverman. With the rise of the importance of the motion-picture industry, Daily Variety, a daily edition based in Los Angeles, California, was founded by Silverman in 1933. In 1998, the...

 said, "script tries to build up a full range of heroic characters in conflict but is let down by workaday dialogue and direction that doesn't conjure any special atmosphere. Only Hurt, who can always be relied on to turn the most basic dialogue metal into something resembling gold, comes close to giving the picture any verbal style. But despite a couple OK action sequences, the first hour largely passes before delivering any serious mano a mano with the mean Moorwen. [...] Color processing has a cold, grungy look in daytime exteriors and a slightly fuzzy, amber-drenched look in interiors. Geoff Zanelli's score is off-the-shelf heroic-action wallpaper. However, production and costume design do sport an impressive authenticity, and effects work does the job in a genre-ish way. Alas, Patrick Tatopoulos' monster simply recalls elements of other, more famous aliens."
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes
Rotten Tomatoes is a website devoted to reviews, information, and news of films—widely known as a film review aggregator. Its name derives from the cliché of audiences throwing tomatoes and other vegetables at a poor stage performance...

 reported that 38% of critics gave the film a positive review, based on sixty reviews.

Historical accuracy

King Rothgar's court is shown to include a Christian
Christian
A Christian is a person who adheres to Christianity, an Abrahamic, monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth as recorded in the Canonical gospels and the letters of the New Testament...

 monk
Monk
A monk is a person who practices religious asceticism, living either alone or with any number of monks, while always maintaining some degree of physical separation from those not sharing the same purpose...

. However, in reality, the first recorded attempts at spreading Christianity in Norway were made some two hundred years after the setting of the movie, by King Haakon the Good (reigned 934–961 AD), who had studied in England, then a Catholic kingdom. However, Norway was not unified under a single king until 872 AD, indicating that King Rothgar is the head of one of the petty kingdoms that would later become part of Norway.

Box office

"Outlander" had a limited release on January 23, 2009 at 81 theaters and grossed $59,581 at the U.S. box office in its opening weekend and as of August 2009, it had earned $166,003 in the U.S. and $6,192,098 worldwide, against a reported budget of US$47 million.

External links

  • The Moorwen Creature Design at G4
    G4 (TV channel)
    G4, also known as G4 TV, is an American cable- and satellite-television channel originally geared primarily toward young adult viewers, originally based on the world of video games...

  • Outlander official UK web site
  • Outlander film trailer at You Tube
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