Norway. 709 A.D. One night a reindeer lifts its head. Extreme close-up on eye reflects a flaming orb descending at high speed. Impact on lake tosses fish from their abode. Flop on shore. Likewise the two spacemen aboard the orb, now sinking to lake bottom. One dies. The other is Kainan (James Caviezel), a fish out of water from another planet. He powers up his rugged laptop and swings an attachment to an eighth of an inch from his left eyeball to upload Old Norse, so he can talk with the local Vikings. Director-writer Howard McCain and writer Dirk Blackman embroil the stranger in local hostilities, until a hostile of another order intrudes. Not from myth or lore, nor from Lucifer, this is a Moorwen, explains Kainan. The monster must have hidden inside his crashed spaceship. Now it and its offspring are marking their territory by doing unto Vikings what Kainan’s people did unto Moorwens, back when Kainan helped kill them off to steal their planet as a settlement. A flashback to bulldozers pushing Moorwen corpses into trenches suggests genocide is not limited to one galaxy. “Outlander” uses the usual elements of a stranger-in-town Western: Kainan unites folks against a common foe, faces down a rival, befriends an outcast tyke, earns kudos from the king and wins over the woman with the independent streak. All very familiar: genre garbed in Viking. And no subtitles for any Old Norse dialogue, as if all the locals uploaded colloquial English via the alien laptop. With Sophia Myles, Jack Huston, Ron Perlman and John Hurt. 115m. Widescreen. (Bill Stamets)
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