Outlander is a fun action movie that combines elements of fantasy and science fiction for an experience that compares itself to Beowulf and Predator right on the DVD box cover. It stars James Caviezel (Mel Gibson's bloody Jesus) and packs in quite a bit of action. This is a pretty big budget movie that never got a theatrical release, but it does look like some money was spent on the production.

The movie opens with a spaceship crashing on Earth, and out crawls James Caviezel. He's from another planet in another galaxy, and he lands in the year 709 AD in Norway. Soon thereafter, he is apprehended by some Vikings who want to blame him for the destruction of a nearby village. Caviezel then explains that the thing that destroyed the village is actually a creature that got on board his ship and made it crash. He never goes into the whole space alien thing because they probably would have just chopped his head off. The Vikings and their Norse mythology think it's a dragon or some kind of devil sent from hell.

After Caviezel sets up a homing beacon and waits for his people to come get him, he has no other choice than to help the people of the village defend themselves against the alien. As you might imagine, there's a pretty princess involved who is looking for a husband. With all that going on, the Vikings are in the middle of a small war with another group of Vikings lead by a very scary-looking Ron Perlman of Hellboy.

According to the Wikipedia, the story behind this $50 million movie is that once it was finished and some edits made, the studio bosses decided not to risk any more money on advertising the project and instead released it to a few theaters before going directly to home video. Even though I liked this movie, I think it probably would have bombed at the box office just because it doesn't have enough star power and the mix of fantasy/sci-fi genres has a limited nerd appeal. This movie compares itself to Beowulf and Predator, but it's not as good as either one of them.

I thought this movie borrowed an incredible amount of material from the original Beowulf story, so much that I wonder if the writers were trying to retell the story with a science fiction slant. Even the king of the Viking village is named Hrothgar, and they all go into a big cave to fight the thing. Since the actual Beowulf movie came so close to the time this movie would have been released to the theaters, I can see now why it never actually made it into most big screens.

The alien in this was very cool, and modeled somewhat like a dragon. It had these weird tentacles that flashed bright red to distract people, and the CGI was very well done. In order for a movie like this to work, it must have good CGI since so much focus is on the creature. That's what makes it stand apart from some of the crappy fantasy/sci-fi B-movies you might also find in the direct-to-video market.

If gore is your thing, this movie has plenty of it. In addition to the monster eating and/or ripping people apart, there's also a good bit of medieval style violence with people getting heads chopped off and more. There's even one pretty good siege sequence where Perlman and crew come charging into the village in full berserker mode. Perlman is really awesome in this, but he is only on screen for about 10 minutes.

James Caviezel was miscast for this role. He just doesn't have the right build to stand up next to big burly Vikings and try to teach them how to fight. On top of that, this is one of those roles where the lead hero type only says a handful of lines. The lack of dialogue only hurts the character development, so you don't really care about the guy that much because the writers didn't spend too much time building him up. Caviezel gave the role all he could, but there wasn't much meat to it.

This was directed by Howard McCain, who previously made a few B-movies and also co-wrote this and the last Underworld movie along with Dirk Blackman. At one time, Renny Harlin was attached to direct, and Karl Urban and/or Thomas Jane were to star, according to the IMDb.

If you like fantasy/sci-fi stuff, you will surely find something to like about Outlander. It's got Vikings, big bearded guys with swords and axes, spaceships, aliens, big explosions, a damsel in distress, and more. It is definitely worth a rental. The DVD has a ton of bonus features.

Recommended: Yes