Highlander 2: How an awful film predicted our awful future
The first part of my life was defined by three disasters: the Challenger explosion, 9/11, and Highlander 2.
The latter of these possibly had the biggest effect on me. See, I was the world’s biggest Highlander fan. I didn’t care that the Scottish guy had a Belgian accent and the Egyptian guy had a Scottish accent. I just cared that there were dudes knocking the shit out of each other with massive swords to the sound of Queen.
And that’s all I wanted from Highlander II: The Quickening.
Instead, we got a bunch of weird sci-fi nonsense about how all of the immortals were aliens. It was a lot like the disappointment Star Wars fans felt when Lucas insisted on adding the entirely superfluous Midichlorians plotline.
Except this was worse. Because it affected me.
But there was one scene that stuck with me over the years. Throughout this awful century, I’ve often found myself thinking, “huh, that reminds me of Highlander 2.”
A brief description of Highlander 2’s “plot”
Most of the action in this 1991 film takes place in the near future, from 1999 up until the early 2020s. Now, back in the early 90s, our biggest ecological concern was the ozone layer: a thin membrane of protective gasses that shields the planet from ultraviolet light. Chemicals used in refrigerators and aerosols were punching a big hole in this layer, which was melting the Arctic and giving people skin cancer.
Highlander 2 imagines a world where the ozone layer has rotted away entirely, and we’re all under the burning eye of the sun. Luckily, Conor MacLeod, our immortal hero, is also a great scientist. He builds a giant laser shield that surrounds the earth and keeps us safe.
The only problem? Life on earth sucks now.
The laser shield blocks out most sunlight, so daylight is thick and grey, like concrete. It also has a global warming effect, so temperate climates are now unbearably humid.
Everyone is safe, but everyone is unhappy.
There’s a scene where MacLeod is in a bar and a woman recognizes him as the genius behind the laser shield. Rather than thank him for saving their lives, she says, “great, I always wanted to meet the guy that turned the world to shit.”
Highlander II as Marxist anticipation of late capitalism’s catastrophic stage
Since Highlander II bellyflopped into cinema notoriety in 1991, there have been several global events that reminded me of that laser shield.
The 90s saw the rise of neoliberalism, which is basically the belief that the entire world should share a single system: liberal democracy with open capitalism.
At first, people like Blair and Clinton helped to spread the philosophy. The dotcom boom made a lot of people rich, and their military interventions in Rwanda and Kosovo made us look like we were moral enough to impose our will in the world.
Fast forward a few years, and George W Bush is dealing with the dotcom collapse and ensuing recession. It doesn’t stop him speading the neoliberal gospel with force, pouring troops across the globe. Obama followed him, except he sent drones instead of soldiers, because that man understood how to deliver a tech dystopia.
But the real Highlander II moment was in 2008, when a bunch of cokehead derivative traders fucked up and almost took the whole economy with them. We found ourselves on the brink of systemic collapse. You go to the ATM and nothing comes out — that kind of collapse.
Neoliberal governments came up with a brilliant solution to save us. Basically, they took all of our money and gave it to the bankers. In most places, this policy was called Austerity. In the US, it was business as usual.
And austerity worked! Well, it worked in the sense that the banks kept going. Once traders knew that their actions had absolutely no consequences, they got back to shorting insulin futures and earnestly loving The Wolf of Wall Street.
The only consequence? Life became fractionally more miserable for everyone else on the planet.
Now we have all this and a pandemic. The mishandling of coronavirus has given us the worst of both worlds. It’s like living under a laser shield while still being at constant risk of developing skin cancer.
In grudging praise of Highlander II: The Quickening
To be honest, the only thing I really remember about Highlander II’s future was the mood.
There hadn’t been an apocalypse. Society hadn’t collapsed. And yet everyone was pissed off all the time.
MacLeod’s laser shield had saved the world, but it made everything a little worse. Everyone was depresssed and angry all the time, and everybody was spoiling for a fight. There was a general sense of nobody having a future. Just this endless purgatory, rolling on forever.
MacLeod kind of hopes to be regarded as a hero for saving the world. Instead, he gets his ass kicked. And you could argue that it’s unreasonable, that he did his best to save everyone.
But wouldn’t you love to find the genius behind austerity and punch him in the face?
So, well done, Highlander II: The Quickening. Your janky, low-budget, zero-percent-on-Rotten-Tomatoes-having ass may have crushed my adolescent expectations. But you did a great job of setting expectations for life in the 2020s.
