Outlander (2008)

I echo the sentiments of other reviewers. Solid cast, classic story space, aliens, and Vikings...all based on the literary classic Beowulf. Worth the rental if you're into solid sci-fi. The special effects are excellent and the monster quite scary. The guy who decided to assemble all of these facets into one story is a creative genius in my opinion.

This film has EVERYTHING! It's genius and the writer is a genius for managing to take every good thing possible that makes a film interesting and then stitch all those elements together without making a mess of it.It's enthralling from the first scene to the last. It may have a few flaws that other reviewers have picked on, but I was too dazzled by what I was seeing to notice any holes. It really is a visual feast and the acting is terrific too, plus there are real relationships/bonds created between the characters, meaning that it's not just all superficial action without any substance or reason.Added to the solidity of the whole thing and its knock-out concept we're also treated to first class SFX and a fantastic creature! There's nothing more that anyone could want who loves watching this type of genre. I'd recommend it to anyone and I could watch it over and over!

Well, I don't know if it can be called a "sci-fi" movie. You have at most 5 minutes of science fiction in the almost two hours that I lost by watching this movie. Also, it is not that exact historic if I put it that way. I'm not sure if these filmmakers know how real vikings looked like ? To recap, real vikings lived in Scandinavia, in subarctic climate (where it's damn cold). This movie shows us vikings in an unrealistic environment with volcanoes and lava, in an almost Mediterranean environment. The vikings walk with short sleeves, look like Americans, behave like Americans and have almost nothing in common with vikings, except few viking shields and a viking village. Come on, the filmmakers could do better than that. At least some effort would make the movie much more realistic. And I haven't seen one viking that is naturally blond or at least to look like one. Most of them have brown or black hair with some hair parts that are colored to blond. I mean everybody knows that the Scandinavian people are blond with pale skin (due to low levels of Melanin because they are not exposed to sun). It's because they live in winter lands :) Except these simple geographic and scientific facts that have nothing to do with this (not science, but more of a fiction) movie, it also lack creativity. It's full of plot holes. The story is undeveloped, so at least to say, and it has no twist at all. Action scenes have not much creativity in it and the whole idea of the movie ends where it has started: at the beginning. I won't recommend it to anyone.

In terms of realism, it perhaps lacks something in the depictions of the Vikings, but come on, this is a science fiction actioner. And as such it works very well. The characters have dimensions to them, the plot is straightforward, and in terms of the big set pieces this is done very well indeed. Jim Caviezel is excellent as the "human alien" Kainan, whose space ship crashes in 709 AD Norway, and unleashes the monster, the Moorwen, who destroyed his own people. The gradual acceptance of Kainan into the vikings' group forms the emotional heart of the story as he comes to care for the people he's landed among. This isn't Shakespeare, and it is a great deal better than many bigger budget and more highly advertised films (Beowulf itself, for instance). It is well worth checking it out on DVD. A good evening's entertainment.