I saw the Highlander 1986 movie in the theater when it first came out. Sean Connery also plays a highlander in it, and maybe Sean was really my first Scottish crush, as I've been a James Bond fan since I was a baby."There can be only one!" is the catch phrase of this franchise.
The 1986 Highlander movie stars Christopher Lambert as Connor MacLeod, who we first see in modern New York, but who soon goes back in memory to the 16th century highlands, where he first found out he was an immortal, doomed to fight other immortals for the privilege of being the last immortal alive.
The parts of the 1986 Highlander movie that take place in the highlands evoke that same feeling I get when I read Outlander or watch Rob Roy.
I love that feeling that I'm living history. I read and watched those later, and so my impressions of them were colored by Christopher Lambert's performance.
The Lambert movie was the inspiration for the Highlander TV show that ran from 1992 till 1998, starring Adrian Paul as Duncan MacLeod and sometimes guest starring Christopher Lambert. I watched the TV show, too, but it wasn't as good as the first movie, in my opinion. There was too much about modern times and not nearly enough about the highlands. Duncan used a katana instead of a claymore sword, which I found off-putting.
The writers of the TV show did take the story back into fantasy and history, thank goodness, and away from the science fiction leanings of the Highlander II movie disaster.
Stream the Highlander 1986 movie if you love highlanders and you haven't seen it. But don't bother with Highlander II: the Quickening (1991). That movie jumps the shark clear into outer space. Literally. It sucks.
Gregory Widen wrote both the story and the screenplay of the Highlander 1986 movie, and he wrote the first season of scripts for the 1992 TV series season. As a writer myself, I can just imagine his distaste on seeing Highlander II: the Quickening (1991). Writer Brian Clemons took that in a wholly different direction. It did well in the box office the first weekend, but work of mouth spread about how it missed the point of the first movie completely.
The first movie was about the highlands, really. It was about a proud and mysterious and fierce people known as the Scottish highlanders: gaels like the Irish, but bred with the Vikings into a truly awesome group of fighting clans.
