Highlander
Highlander almost works…as a movie, a television series, a media franchise. Almost; not quite, but I love it nonetheless. (Spoilers for a 1986 movie and 1992-9 tv series below…)
In general, Highlander concerns immortals secretly living among mankind, periodically dueling to decapitation, their only means death, in pursuit of an ambiguous Prize. More specifically, the 1986 film concerns itself with the life of Connor MacLeod (Christopher Lambert), a 467-year-old Scot who’s eschewed love since the death of his wife (Beatie Edney) but becomes the object of a police forensics specialist (Roxanne Hart) obsessed with sword-making while he tries to kill an ancient barbarian (Clancy Brown) who slew his mentor (Sean Connery).
Hey, it’s a kind of magic!
I prefer Peter Bellwood and Larry Ferguson’s re-write of Gregory Widen’s UCLA screenplay to the movie—which doesn’t quite capture the magic on the page—but I appreciate that the script, rendered fully on screen, would lack energy of Russell Mulcahy’s direction. The movie’s mood and tone are perfect, the transitions between present-day and flashbacks superb, and the casting mind-boggling; yes, we’ll have the legally blind Frenchman who doesn’t speak English as the titular highlander and get the world’s most famous Scotsman—who plays all nationalities with his native brogue— to play an Egyptian pretending to be a Spaniard.
(Gary Kilworth’s novelization [written as by Gary Douglas] is also quite good, salvaging much of what was lost from script to screen.)
Ignoring the sequels, we come to the television series, concerning Connor’s younger clansman, Duncan (Adrian Paul), because Lambert wouldn’t commit to tv and wasn’t doing a terribly good job of not aging. Under the auspices of David Abramowitz—who took over in the midst of a muddled debut season—the concept became a meditation on morality with a 400-year-old sword-wielding arbiter of right and wrong. Major conceptual innovations like the Watchers, who are meant to observe and record the activities of the immortals with objective detachment— represented by MacLeod’s decidedly partisan observer, Joe Dawson (Jim Byrnes)— and Methos (Peter Wingfield), the oldest-living immortal add dramatic wrinkles to the format and long-form explorations of the possibilities and varieties of immortal life (almost) make up for the show completely dropping the methodology by which immortals live in an increasingly computerized world and the element of the police procedural that grounded the movie (but was, arguably, one of the bigger casualties of the cuts).