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. 

Psychedelic Apes

Nuclear Dinos VS
Mushroom Deities

Psychedelic Apes -
From Parallel Universes to
Atomic Dinosaurs - The Weirdest
Theories of Science and History
by Alex Boese
Pan Books
ISBN: 9781509860524

Psychedelic Apes, advertised on the front of the book with the additional subtitle/strap line From Parallel Universes to Atomic Dinosaurs - The Weirdest Theories of Science and History, is one of those books I try and find every year which fulfils the criterion of a non-fiction book about something interesting that doesn’t have a filmic or comic book slant to it. Although, it has to be said, many of the theories which the book depicts in its entertaining fashion will be mostly taken, by the majority of readers, as not falling anywhere near the ‘non-fiction’ category either, I suspect. It is, as its cover spiel suggests, a look at some of the unorthodox and, therefore often entertaining, alternate theories put forward by scientists over the years. I think I saw this one fly by my Twitter timeline and, looking at it, the author Alex Boese has a few books on his CV, all with equally provocative titles which I shall probably have to look out for.

Okay... now I was pleasantly surprised when I started reading this, since I am inexplicably known to certain acquaintances as having somewhat unorthodox views about things myself, that Boese has really gone out of his way to not ridicule the various theories and hypotheses which he explores here. Instead... and he says as much in his introduction... he has allowed them room to breathe and brought in the arguments for and against the various ideas he’s chosen, out of the many wild theories that exist, treating them with a certain respect. In doing so, I actually found myself not only not being able to disprove many of the theories inherent in the book but, also, as I went along, began to have more of an understanding of certain branches of science. More on that in a minute but for now...

Following an introduction where, among other things, he makes clear to the reader what scientists mean by theories and hypotheses... one is supported by a set of evidence, the second is not (although I now believe, after having read this, that evidence may well be a subjective element of the equation). The book is nicely laid out in five big chapters called 1. Cosmological Conundrums, 2. A Pale Peculiar Dot, 3. It’s Alive, 4. The Rise Of The Psychedelic Ape and 5. Mushroom Gods And Phantom Time. Each chapter will then house a brief, one to two page introduction as to the thematic link of the chapter before then being split into seven subsections per chapter, each one detailing a theory in a few pages, most of which are doing exactly what it says on the tin, so to speak. However, one thing he also does is include one theory, in each chapter, which was ridiculed by the scientific community for many years/decades/centuries before certain articles of evidence (and perhaps fashion, who knows?) caused a major flip flop in thinking and those particular theories are now actually accepted as the true way of things.

So yeah, he covers quite ridiculous sounding ideas such as reality as a computer simulation, parallel universes (perhaps more popularly known these days, once again, as multiverses), an expanding planet Earth, the shadow world of hard to detect alien life forms on our planet, life on Mars, the ‘stoned ape’ theory (that argues quite credibly, in my opinion, that our hairy ancestors were driven by the ingestion of magic mushrooms which gave rise to humanity and various elements of an expanded mind such as speech), the systematic dumbing down of human intelligence from century to century (yeah, I think we can all see that one), the possibility that the dark ages didn’t actually exist, that Greek writer Homer was in fact a woman and that Christ was either Julius Caesar or, in one interesting theory, Jesus was actually a mushroom... among many others.

Perhaps my favourite one was an argument very hard to either prove or, indeed disprove, as it turns out, that certain dinosaurs did in fact have great intelligence and managed to wipe themselves out in a nuclear war. Yeah, this stuff sounds far fetched but, when you read why the people who explore these concepts (lots of these theories are come up with simultaneously by more than one person, often not in collusion), there are actually some very logical, sound basis for their conclusions.  

Now, okay, I found myself unable to argue with many of the theories on offer in here but, as various scientists have obviously argued vehemently against them... and considering they argued just as emphatically over the years against theories which they are now accepting as truth... I had to conclude that some of these theories were an actual possibility. Not only that, though... 

 As I was reading through it became abundantly clear just how many accepted ‘truths’ of science concerning history and the nature of our reality actually had as little or no evidence to support them either. My faith in science was completely rattled by this tome because it seems many of the theories we hold dear are just popular guesses. The fact that Boese pointed out that the entirety of chimpanzee history of the past is based on just three found teeth didn’t help restore any faith in the concept of scientific proof as I read through. Neither did his revelation (to me) that most of pre-history (and even closer history) is pieced together by guesses which are the equivalent of somebody trying to piece together the plot of a long lost movie with only a few frames of film to build up a picture from. It’s shaky at best and, frankly, it never seems to be at its best from what I can make out.

So yeah, all in all I’d have to conclude that Psychedelic Apes is a pretty entertaining but also somewhat enlightening, surprisingly. It’s not what I was expecting it to be and my already slightly open minded state is now permanently ajar for any rogue theory with any kind of corroboration which comes along, frankly. I can’t recommend this one enough, especially since it’s all done in ‘laymens’ terms and isn’t remotely clouded by scientific jargon or obstacles. I shall, indeed, be reading more of this guys work in the future.