Other Titles • Highlander: Endgame • Highlander 4: The Search for Connor • Highlander IV • Highlander IV: World Without End • Highlander: A New Order • Highlander 4
This part of the story-telling was particularly challenging to talented martial artist Adrian Paul, who had never in all his many episodes of HIGHLANDER had to use so many sophisticated warrior techniques. "This was a huge amount of work," admits Paul. "But the result is some of the most exciting fight scenes I've ever been involved with."
Paul also studied intensively with Swordmaster F. Braun Ash, a long-time consultant to the HIGHLANDER series, who developed a variety of new weapons and swordfighting techniques for HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME.
Summarizes Adrian Paul: "We really wanted to up Duncan's technique to a level people haven't seen before -- a level he must rise to in this final battle."
HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME was shot primarily in and around Bucharest, Romania, a location that offered the required mix of both modern and ancient visual influences, that had both stunning natural landscapes and sprawling urban centers. The filmmakers found Romania to be almost like a time-machine itself -- able to represent the17th century just as easily as the 2lst. The city of Bucharest, once known as "Little Paris" in the 1920s, still has many magnificent classic European buildings which stand side-by-side with post-industrial monolithic structures of concrete and steel (most built during the reign of Romania's dictator, Ceaucescu.)
Other locations included London's Natural History Museum and the futuristic Millennium Dome, all of which added to the trademark HIGHLANDER sense of discontinuous, ever-flowing time and space. For Doug Aarniokoski, moving back and forth through the ages was all part of the excitement. "We really gave the modern scenes and the flashback scenes their own individual styles," the director explains. "The contemporary battles and fights are very flashy, fancy, edgy, whereas the 17th century fights are much more traditional, even in the cinematography. Cinematographer Doug Milsome really helped me to create two different looks: the contemporary scenes are dark and shadowy and the flashback scenes are lighter with wide-open landscapes."
Later Aarniokoski worked with leading-edge special effects supervisor Nick AIlder, whose creations have been seen in films ranging from "Alien" to "The Fifth Element" to "Braveheart," to tweak the reality with supernatural twists.
The overall effect is one of ever-increasing darkness, of doom that has been long approaching, and now finally has arrived. Can there really only be one in the end? HIGHLANDER: ENDGAME provides the compelling answer to a question that has lingered since the very first HIGHLANDER won over fans across the world.
Movie Database
In Theaters
