“From the dawn of time we came… moving silently down through the centuries… living many secret lives… struggling to reach the time of the Gathering, when the few who remain will battle to the last. No one has ever known we were among you. Until now… “
I never saw the original Highlander in a theater. I have a dim memory of renting the VHS tape one night when I was in high school. It didn’t do much for me at the time. The disjointed storytelling leaping back and forth from the present to the past, immortal men hacking away at each other with broadswords in grotty New York City alleyways, Christopher Lambert’s mouthful-of-rocks diction, and the psychedelic animated climax scene all left me wondering what the hell I’d just wasted my time on. I didn’t get it. And I largely forgot about it.
Cut to a few years later, when I was working at the movie theater and an assistant manager with whom I was friendly asked if I wanted to go with him to the exhibitor’s screening of Highlander 2. FYI, exhibitor’s screenings were private showings for theater staff that took place anywhere from a couple weeks to several months before a film was released. Often, the films were still in post-production at the time, so what you saw wasn’t the final cut. Special effects sequences might be missing, and temporary music tracks may have been laid down as placeholders. But they were close enough to the finished product so that theater managers could get an idea of what the movie was and plan for promotions and such. Highlander 2 was… something. But it did at least inspire me to go back and revisit the original, largely to try and figure out what the hell was going on in the sequel. Seeing the first one again didn’t help with that — if you know, you know — but this time something clicked for me. This time, I saw the MTV-inspired camerawork, the aesthetic veneer of the grainy 1980s film stock, the goofy and chilling charisma of Clancy Brown as the punk-rock barbarian villain, the wounded appeal of Lambert’s hero, Sean Connery’s swashbuckling charm, and the romantic notion of an ordinary man doomed by fate to outlive everyone he cares about. And just like that, I became a fan.
When the Highlander TV series debuted a short time later, I became an even bigger fan of that. Highlander — both the TV series and the original film — became something of an obsession for me throughout my twenties, and I could write a long essay about why, exactly. Let’s just say that it was the right time in my life for this particular franchise. (We won’t speak of the sequel movies; that’s a whole different essay!)
Decades later, I met Lambert at my local FanX Salt Lake Comic Convention, and the tale of my brief moment in his company is one of my all-time favorite convention stories. (Briefly, there was a self-important handler who was snottily proclaiming to everyone who came through the line “No selfies! No selfies!” But once I got in front of Cristoph and told him he’d been on my wish list for a long time — I may have said “headhunting list,” which is my usual personal term and not an intentional Highlander pun — he smiled, gave one of his trademark staccato laughs (heh) and said, “Really? Let’s take a selfie!” And he said it loud enough for the handler to hear.)
Today is the 40th anniversary of Highlander‘s Los Angeles premiere. The blink of an eye for an immortal. Two blinks for me.
