Hacker Cinema
Highlander
1986 · Film · 116 min
Part of Highlander Collection
Directed by Russell Mulcahy
He fought his first battle on the Scottish Highlands in 1536. He will fight his greatest battle on the streets of New York City in 1986. His name is Connor MacLeod. He is immortal.
4 positive1 negative24 neutralfrom 29 commenters
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30 comments on Hacker News
"It's a good time to be a Highlander fan. As part of its 40th anniversary, a 4K restoration of the 1986 cult classic will return to theaters for a limited run. The re-release will be accompanied by an all-new poster, and a collector's edition UHD and Blu-Ray release that hits stores June 16."
Got to see this on the big screen again. Sometimes the film is corny, sometimes funny, but at times I find it strangely moving. It hits differently now that I am much older. A guilty pleasure.
> I do get the sense that many atheists not only reject God & the afterlife but actually don't want there to be a God or an afterlife.
I feel that eternity in Heaven would actually be Hell, because nothing would matter. No danger, no failure, no challenge, no goals, no purpose. What gives life meaning are mortality, limitations, beginnings and endings, progress.
I recently watched the film "Eternity" on Apple TV, starring Elizabeth Olsen, in which everyone after they die has to choose their own form of afterlife and then stick with it forever. All I could think about was how bored I would eventually get. (The film itself was pretty good, not boring. That's because it had an ending!)
Fiction is ideal for playing out these scenarios. Think also of the film "Highlander", in which the ultimate "prize" of the immortals turns out to be mortality. MacLeod's life had become repetitive, and he couldn't fully invest in it, because he kept losing everyone he loved. They grew old and died, while he lived on and had to keep changing identities. For a while it's a grand adventure... until it isn't anymore.
I can certainly understand wanting to live longer, but eternity is unimaginably long, way too long. I don't think that's something to be desired.
Watched it with a few people who enjoy different movie genres, and nobody was bored, which is rare for the group I watch movies with frequently.
Would I watch it again? Probably not. Was it my favourite Gosling movie? Nope.
Tough to beat The Place Beyond the Pines.
Is it better than the (audio)book? I have no idea.
Ryan Gosling is one of those actors who make movies emotionally immersive, like Highlander wouldn’t be the same without Sean Connery or What Dreams May Come without Robin Williams. Glad he’s young and fit enough for me to enjoy his acting for a bit longer.
Maybe his acting career is aging like fine wine. Unlike you, Ryan Reynolds.
I interpreted it as "there can only be one" which I believe is a quote from the Highlander movie; it's a "winner takes all" and that winner gets the title of "highlander."
In this situation then everyone who _isn't_ the winner will go broke -> sell off all their stuff on the cheap because they're desperate -> the winner gets all their hardware for a great deal and becomes even more powerful.
Mostly the newer ones try to improve the older ones.
I guess at some later point one will dominate and the others will go sleep mode. Just like in the movie Highlander - there can only be one. (I couldn't name offhand which JIT is the main one right now ... I always think it is from Takashi Kokubun but that may now be outdated. MJIT YJIT ZJIT HUJIT WAJIT WTFJIT GRANDMAJIT - too many JITs.)
If life had appeared before the Earth-Theia collision, it could have been terminated by any of the earlier impacts.
The Earth-Theia collision has been only the last of a great number of collisions.
The original Earth had been much smaller and it had grown by colliding with many similar bodies.
The reason why the last collision is likely to have been also the greatest is that both Earth and Theia had grown previously through many collisions.
This has been similar to the "Highlander" movies, where each victorious immortal took the force of the decapitated one, until only 2 remained for the final confrontation, which were stronger than any of the previous immortals, because these 2 had gathered the forces of all the others.
In the same way the planets close to Earth have grown after each collision, at the expense of the smaller impactor, so the impacts have been between bigger and bigger planets, until the final collision between Earth and Theia, which both were bigger than the participants to earlier impacts from their history.
Before this final impact, the time intervals between 2 successive big impacts might have been too short for life to appear.
Especially the Highlander, a film set mostly in Scotland and Connery is supposed to be Spanish...
>> "Same three bands appear in three different presentations with different labels"
This has the makings of a Highlander episode. Three groups of immortals forming bands in different generations.
> Last year I was chatting with the 20 year old son of a friend, and he didn't know what Highlander was.
Well there was only the one movie.
Similar observation here. In a statically linked global problem it's the linkers job to enforce the theme of the old "Highlander" movie... there can be only one. So "global coherence" is not some problem brought about Rust or Traits, but it's a fact of life. And considering the author's own admittance of "Local Implicits" having a "Correctness problem", I don't see how it could even be considered as an alternative. I'll take correctness over convenience any day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Clancy is an incredible actor in his own right both voice and general. I'll always have a soft spot for him as Kurgan in the first Highlander movie. He was so... unsettling.
Overall, I agree with you, but, as a fan of the Highlander TV series, I find this fun to think about sometimes.
People would still die, just not from natural causes (right?). Even today, dictators have more fear of a coup than cancer. Long lived species tend to have fewer offspring as well & would have to confront the issue of limited resources head on, instead of kicking the can to the next generation. I think a society that grows up around humans with unlimited life expectancy would probably look different than ours does, maybe in ways we can't imagine (even today, ritualistic suicide like Sallekhana is hard to imagine...). This would be different from a situation where people living today suddenly make this switch.
Maybe they just ran out of ideas? These two didn't even write the original stories; the author George RR Martin did, but he didn't finish the story before they got to season 7 or 8, so they made up all the last stuff themselves without him.
Even if they had written the screenplays themselves, that's no guarantee of future quality. I can think of two cases with movies where the same people made horrible sequels: the original "Highlander" was great, for example, but the same director (and story writer) did the sequel and it was horrible. Similarly, "The Matrix" was revolutionary, but the same two brothers who wrote the story and directed did the sequels, and they weren't that great (though arguably not the huge drop in quality between Highlander 1 and 2).
> The US/Hollywood is far more prudish since my youth.
The prudishness manifested differently. I recall a lot more nudity and at least as many sex scenes in movies I watched as a kid (under 18).
Highlander
Lethal Weapon
Robocop
Life of Brian
Even OG Batman had some nudity and referenced sex in it as a PG-13.
Exposed breasts and sex scenes were pretty common. Full frontal nudity was even relatively common. And sometimes wouldn't even garner an R rating.
Of course you can, Duncan MacLeod is living in one in the Highlander TV show [0] ;)
Many are also "fixed" restaurants, bars / nightclubs.
[0] https://twitter.com/yohannmultipass/status/1118142250788315143
I loved Privateer. I found an iOS game called Galaxy on Fire which is basically in the same spirit and it took me back.
I wonder how many people remember Privateer 2 with all the cut scenes with the guy who played Darius in the old Highlander TV series?
'The Man Who Would Be King' is a wonderful film. He was also in some stinkers ('Highlander' springs to mind).
Please someone make a movie about Highlander programmers!
Nothing on Disney+ from the extensive catalog they own of any movies rated over PG-13. (think 20th Century Fox and Touchstone pictures - Alien, Die Hard, Exorcist, Highlander, The Omen... and even of those that are PG, many also not available, like original Planet of the Apes series, etc.) I have a free 1-yr promo tie-in membership and it's ok, but I will not be continuing when it expires. If they had all those other films from the catalogs they own I would much more likely pay them.
Why shouldn’t we ask that without eternal life?
>
Seeing how I change with years, I’d like to live to 200-500-1000 years old. Not because I want to live so bad, but because this is a frightening distance that is a completely wild territory for us to imagine. I’ll watch that movie (if not yet), thanks for the reference. Everything I watched before was pretty “same person tired and/or mindless”-centric, like interview with a vampire, highlander, etc. But it was more entertainment, what humans like to see at cinema, than a really deep analysis of thousands of years old beings.
Thinking that you’ll be the same after an amount of time is naive.
oh, the "quickening" in the highlander movies makes some more sense now too, thanks.
That is true at the entire-species level assuming a uniform selection pressure against the entire species. However, evolution also occurs when a species adapts specific traits to fill an environment niche. Traits can still be selected for when the trait involved allows the organism to compete for a different set of resources. Humans also do not reproduce randomly. Currently, it is widely accepted in the Western world that people get to choose who they have children with, and that choice can select for similar traits. Marriage customs in other cultures are different, but still can have an effect on trait selection. For example, the royal families of Europe positively selected for some fairly harmful traits (like hemophilia), because other traits (already belonging to the family) were also being positively selected for filling the niche of royalty.
Consider something like a "Highlander" allele, that has a chance to randomly appear in the general population, granting them the same stipulations as in the movie. Given that there can be only one, this particular allele has terrible reproductive success in the sense that practically no offspring will ever survive. However, the gene will always tend to exist in the population. Now, if there is some event that occurs that increases the maximum of number of Highlanders, this event will put positive selection pressure on the allele, even though the general population can reproduce much faster.
You’ll live to a thousand years, but you’ll probably only vividly remember the last five decades, and some smatterings from the past. Is that really meaningful?
I just want to get really good on the mandolin, and that’s probably going to take a few decades more than I actually have. And that’s what I think about when I watch movies about immortals (Highlander and the like). While you’re thinking “oh, the things he must have seen! The rise and fall of empires! The loves won and lost!”, I’m thinking, “he must play a hell of a violin by now.” So I might only remember the last fifty years, but I’ll always be better on the mandolin than I was last year. Who knows, maybe I’d have time to get good on the fiddle?
Highlander was a fine guy film that ended with total closure. Highlander 2: The Sicken...(er, 'scuse me)...Quickening totally mangled the first story, ignored the closed ending, and carried it on in bizzare ways; the Director's Cut reportedly edits the movie severly, effectively turning it into another film. Highlander 3: The Sorcerer formally apologized for the previous film and discarded it, and said of the first film's ending "no, wait, we apologize, the story isn't finished after all" so they could present some more gratuitous sword fights and beheadings. Then there is Highlander: Endgame which rolls back the story to about 2/3rds through the first film, ignored the other two, picked up the TV series (no comment), and tried to end the first story a fourth way...but it's not done, because of the Hollywood need for a happy ending which makes no sense and opens the door for (retch) a fifth sequel/ending; but that's the Producer's Cut version, which is somewhat different from the theatrical release. This movie, in and of itself, is an OK B-movie; in context of the serieses (plural plural), it's another round of "why are they doing this to me (the viewer)" and six profoundly different endings to one otherwise good story. I suggest you watch the fine cult hit film Highlander, and if anyone suggests you watch any sequels consider following Connor McLeoud's example upon them.
So movies are a pretty big business. Not as big as people usually think, compared to energy, food, defense. But pretty big. Culturally, people go to the movies as a form of escapism, because story-telling seems to be a deeply ingrained human need (I don't think there is a single culture we know about that doesn't tell stories). Some of these stories are quite inspirational: they inspire thought, debate, criticism, self-reflection, etc. And some of us, the ones that are inclined to, write reviews. I've written one or two myself. Occasionally conversations get started around movies with friends - arguments about the meaning of Being John Malkovich or why they only made one Highlander movie....
Listening to stories (or watching them, as the case may be) is a usually enjoyable experience - which is why we choose to listen and even pay for the opportunity to listen to a really good story from a really good storyteller. All of the "pain points" around this process have been thoroughly addressed: it's easy to discover movies, buy tickets, download to your computer, get reviews, write reviews. Even the watching experience itself has been improved with 3D (although this is open to debate) and better sound, even things like IMAX and more experimental experiences e.g. Star Tours at Disneyland. There are some places in the world where they even serve food and drink during the movie (or at least during an intermission).
The biggest pain people feel about movies is dealing with the proliferation of choice. It doesn't seem to me that there is an underserved market of people who would see more movies if only they knew about the good ones.
Imagine, if you will, your own personal Heaven. Presumably storytelling and movies are still happening. What is the heavenly, perfect movie-going experience? Does the movie take over your visual cortex? Are movies recommended by God - or indeed, created by Him to perfectly stimulate your mind in the way He knows you like? Does your reaction telepathically propagate to everyone else in Heaven? (Is telepathic propagation connectionless? I suppose that's another thread).
Highlander still had a traditional orchestral score alongside the Queen songs. The Highlander TV series also liberally used some of the songs, most prominently the album recording of the title song "Princes of the Universe" as the theme song, but also variations on "Who Wants To Live Forever" in the score.
There's no question Queen was a fully-sold-out pop band at the end. With their talent they could have easily pursued a less commercial path--and in their early albums, had a fair deal of influence from heavy metal and progressive rock--but for whatever reasons, they didn't. Not a criticism, just a fact.
I don't think you know Freddy Mercury or Queen all that well. Considering they provided the score for two films (Flash Gordon, Highlander) and allowed their music on scores of commercials (e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zr5lZWx9X0 ) yeah, he'd/they'd shill.
My zone is best found between 7pm to 5am, usually on the couch with the laptop, and some easy to zone out tv series playing in the background. I think I've played through the Highlander and 4400 series several times just writing code. Its easier if you've already seen it, so its not really an interruption, but rather a way to keep from burning out on just staring at the computer screen.
Just out of speculation, "Doogie Howser" is a very unambiguous string (other TV shows often have more ambiguous titles, like "Cheers" or "Highlander") that's close to the edge of public recognition--most everyone knows about Doogie Howser, but it's not extremely popular.
Also, the Doogie Howser trendline is pretty flat, aside from various spikes.
This may seem really "out there", but I keep all the code of a package in one file. Not only does this reduce or eliminate asdf/defsystem maintenance, which I loathe doing, it also helps avoid the kind of habit you described. After all, the edits are all in one place.
To borrow a quote from the movie Highlander - "There can be only one (file)!"