I was a young kid one night when I was channel surfing back when there weren’t that many channels and I found Outland on the late show. Just for FYI, that was back when TV stations ran movies in the wee hours instead of shutting off their broadcast signal.
All I remember from the movie was an actor who I didn’t realize was Sean Connery was interrogating some guy who was in a space suit in a small gravity-free room. Yeah, it might seem like a crazy fever dream because he was floating in mid-air in a small room. But years later, I finally got to watch Outland in its total run time and it still remains one of the most ambitious movies that sadly never got its due credit. In the aftermath of the success of Star Wars, science-fiction movies and TV shows exploded. I’m still actually surprised Battlestar Galactica only lasted one season.
A lot of these space movies lacked the spark that made the first Star Wars, now referred to as Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope connect with so many people. Most of them were cheaply made too. Even though SW was heavily inspired by Star Trek, the first Star Trek movie struggled and felt like a bunch of special effects with no plot.
Then Alien premiered in 1979 and there was proof that with the right director and script, it would work. Dan O’Bannon, one of the writers, said he penned Alien partly because people didn’t find his previous work, Dark Star, as funny as he did. I mean, they used a beach ball with fake feet as an alien. O’Bannon said he if couldn’t make people laugh, then he was going to scare them.
As the 1980s came around, science fiction was all the rage thanks to The Empire Strikes Back and success of Alien. A movie like Outland seems like a distant cousin to Alien in that it takes a generic plot and just sets it in space. I mean, Alien is really nothing more than a haunted house/slasher movie set in space.
Filmmaker Peter Hyams, who wrote the movie, said he set it in the same time frame in which Alien was set. And a visual style akin to both Alien and Dark Star, as the movie follows mostly blue-collar workers that were in those other movies. Outland is set on Io, a satellite moon of Jupiter, sometime in the future. A mining company has set up operations on the planet and thus a colony has been established complete with racquetball courts and bars as well as prostitutes.
The movie begins as a thriller as a few of the mining workers go nuts and kill themselves with gruesome results. Before he would become big on Cheers, John Ratzenberger plays the first worker we see lose it as he freaks out thinking there are spiders crawling on himself while working on the moon’s surface and pulls the hose on his suit causing him to decompress. Connery plays William T. O’Neill the new chief marshal who has arrived to become head of law enforcement.
But what O’Neill discovers is there is a very lax way of policing at the colony. His second in command, Sgt. Montone (James B. Skiing) tries to assure him that things will run smoothly as long as he picks and chooses what needs to be handled and investigated. Yet another worker loses it and walks into an elevator through an air lock with no suit on only to decompress into a glob of flesh and blood. The company orders both bodies to be sent back to Earth with no autopsies as there’s little to examine.
O’Neill’s wife and son make a quick exit because she’s tired of living in space, which leads O’Neill’s only ally to be one of the physicians, Dr. Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen). They discover there is a synthetic form of enhanced amphetamines being sold to the people in the colony. They can work 12-14 hours without much of a break but crash, Lazarus says. (Despite they would go on to play mother and son on Cheers, Sternhagen and Ratzenberger don’t appear in any scenes together.)
And it’s also causing the workers to flip out and lose it resulting in violent tendencies. However, the general manager, Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle), doesn’t really care as the workers do more and the company is satisfied with the better outputs. It’s at this point the movie takes a switch from thriller into a neo-western. Outland has been called High Noon In Space and O’Neill finds that no one is willing to help him. Also, Sheppard has arranged for hitmen to arrive on the next shuttle to kill O’Neill, which he finds out about.
With hardly anyone willing to help him, O’Neill doesn’t know who to trust. And since he’s law enforcement, he’s already the odd man out among all the workers who are far away from home just wanting to make some money, take drugs, and have sex with the hookers.
Outland wasn’t a huge success when it was released during the summer of 1981. It’s basically a science-fiction movie for adults. The main cast is mostly in their 40s and 50s. It doesn’t have the youthful thrill of the Star Wars movies but it’s mostly a bleak gritty thriller. It has Hyams’ usual signature of hazy images in dimly lit rooms. Even though Connery does don a space suit for the climax, most of the movie is set inside the metal structure of the colony, which creates a claustrophobic feel.
Even the sleepy quarters of the workers look more like prison cells as the workers have little room to even sleep as they’re stacked on top of each other in crates like livestock. They have to use community bathrooms and showers. It makes you wonder why they’d even be doing such jobs anyway. But O’Neill discovers there are many workers who have criminal records.
I think I heard that some oil workers in northern Alaska are paid top dollar but don’t even have high school diplomas. Most of the miners have scruffy beards and blue-collar looks. They’re probably working these jobs in hopes to save up a lot. But if they’re going to have to pay workers a big salary, they should get more work out of them, which is why the synthetic drugs are being set on every supply shuttle.
Even though it was made 45 years ago, you can still see elements of the way the American workforce treats people. Unfortunately, Boyle never comes off as an effective villain mainly because he’s not utilized as much as Sheppard. When Montone is killed, another marshal Ballard (Clarke Peters) is promoted but is concerned about having the sergeant chevron stripes added to his uniform so quickly. It reminds me of what I heard that the job advertisement for a deceased person’s replacement will be written before the obituary.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 