Brief Thoughts on "Outland"

I've been watching a fair amount of small, largely forgotten, sci-fi films thanks to the kinda-like-Netflix Blockbuster program. The most recent of which is Sean Connery's 1981 film Outland. The film is a blatant rip-off (or you may argue "homage") of the classic Gary Cooper film High Noon. It was this notion that first peaked my interest in the movie after a friend recommended it simply by saying "It's High Noon in space!"

This statement is partially true, but the film has little of the respectability or pacing of High Noon; because this is a sci-fi film, they have to first establish all of the rules of the setting/time before launching into the classic "last man remaining" storyline of the classic Western. Lucky for the film, they were able to just move into the leftover sets from the 1979 film Alien. Oh, and they were able to use the space suits. And the art director. And every other bloody idea aside from the actual alien itself. It's clear the movie was trying to capitalize on the new slow-paced, sterile space station flick that Ridley Scott pioneered two years prior; and while Western storylines are largely universal and can be translated into a number of other genres, I don't know if I would have set it in the claustrophobic world of Alien.

Outland borrows even further from Alien with its promotional tagline. Alien's tagline is "In space, no one can hear you scream." Outland's is "Even in space, the ultimate enemy is man." Aside from the fact that their tagline is inferior in its bulkiness, it also tells me that Outland thinks man is the ultimate enemy on Earth. That's pretty presumptuous, Outland. Perhaps the film would have been better served with a tagline like "Mining Jupiter's Moon Can Be Just as Dangerous as Earth Mines," "Sean Connery's still trying," or "Hey, It's High Noon in space."

The film has some good qualities to it... like lots of exploding heads. Sure, the fact that people's heads explode because of bad scientific logic, but who's counting? There's also a pretty good score by Jerry Goldsmith, who did the music for Planet of the Apes, amongst other things. And let's not forget Peter Boyle as the greedy mining boss.

The only remaining question I have about the film is this: why is Sean Connery the only one up there with an accent? Everyone else on Jupiter's Moon is American, and then here comes this Scottish marshal. No wonder no one respected the guy.