Outland

Io Pic

Outland
USA 1981 Directed by Peter Hyams
HMV/Warner Brothers Blu Ray Zone B

Warning: Full plot spoilers.

It’s been a while since I last saw Outland but I do try and watch it at least once on every home video format I eventually own it on... now it’s the turn of Blu Ray and, it has to be said, the film really hasn’t lost much of its power.

I first saw it at the cinema on the year of its release. I was 13 years old but the film was an AA rating, which was nobody under the age of 14... so I either lied about my age by a year or just wasn’t challenged on the door (I forget which).

The film is set on Io, the third largest moon of the five surrounding Jupiter, on a titanium mining colony run by Con-Am. Sean Connery plays the new marshal of the colony, Marshal O’Niel. He’s only been there a couple of weeks but his wife has had enough of being sent from one grubby outpost to the next and so she takes their son and goes to the nearest space station, waiting for a flight back to Earth (their son has never seen the planet he reads about in books). However, O’Neil can’t join them for now because there’s something bad happening at the mining colony and he’s onto something which is killing people. People are doing things like uncoupling their space suits while out on the surface (we watch in graphic detail as their blood boils and their heads explode as the air and organs inside fight to get out... at least, I’m guessing that’s the scientific idea behind those kinds of deaths... maybe they just look cool), travelling down to the outside in the lifts without any suit at all and just generally going mad.

Teaming up with Dr. Lazarus, played by the incomparable Frances Sternhagen, he discovers that these psychotic episodes went up hugely after the arrival of the branch director. So he starts digging and soon uncovers a bunch of people supplying drugs to increase manpower within the mining community, which also eventually makes their customers psychotic... and it all points back to the company, or at least the branch manager, played by Peter Boyle. However, after O’Neil finds and destroys a shipment of drugs, hit men are sent to kill him, arriving on the next shuttle. And, of course, nobody really wants to help him defend himself from these killers.

Okay, so when I was a kid there were two pieces of conventional wisdom about this film which I took with a grain of salt but do still acknowledge that there is something to them. Firstly that this is a remake of High Noon (reviewed here). Well, of course the last 25 minutes, where O’Neil’s potential allies abandon him to his fate and he has to take on the killers alone (more or less), is absolutely an homage to High Noon but, the film is not a complete remake because High Noon was all about that right from the start of the movie. The first two thirds of Outland, however, are a strong police procedural thriller, which happens to take place on a moon of Jupiter. It’s definitely got its own vibe going and it does what it does very successfully.

The other bit of conventional wisdom at the time of its release... and I remember reading this phrase at the time in Film Review, the ABC cinema chain’s monthly magazine that they sold in the kiosk... was that it’s a ‘poor man’s Alien’. Nope. Neither film has much in common other than the one huge influence of Alien (on pretty much everything at the time) of the lived-in, aged up sets with a kind of built in obsolescence. So yeah, it’s certainly gone down that route but, no, it’s a ‘poor man’s’ nothing.

What it is, is a top notch thriller with brilliant performances by both Connery and Sternhagen (who have remarkable chemistry together... how come these two weren’t teamed up in another film?) backed up by a, perhaps slightly simple but certainly solid story and what were, for the time, state-of-the-art special effects... which generally have, for the most part, aged well and don’t look too clunky on the Blu Ray format. What ages the film most is the nature of the computer graphics on the screens but, like a lot of speculative movie fiction, if the film makers had guessed how advanced things have gotten by today, then the films would have lacked credibility for the audiences of the time, for sure. I especially like the interactive, screen golf game that Peter Boyle’s character plays in his apartment.

And, added to this, it’s all supported by a really great score by the fabulous Jerry Goldsmith. He was in his phase where he was experimenting with very subtle electronic augmentation to the orchestra and it’s a truly wonderful score, mixing the dense atmospheric cues of the depressing environment the miners work in with some wonderful action cues which never let the toes stop tapping (I still listen to it on my bus journey home some evenings).

So that’s me on Outland. One of the great science fiction movies of the early 1980s and some of the best of cinema of that era, for sure. Definitely worth checking out if you’ve never seen it and especially if you like police procedural thrillers.