Viking Night: Outland
By Bruce Hall
February 9, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Too late. The answer, of course, is nothing. Unless you mean Sean Connery in space, riding a dinosaur and using his laser vision to fight ninja robots. But enough about my failed attempts at fan fiction. Sean Connery is a proven badass, and his manly exploits are known far and wide. I am comfortable assuming that when Outland was first pitched, those four words were all that was needed to make it rain. So, Director Peter Hyams' (2010, Timecop) self-written script became a reality, and everyone's favorite Bond would play his reluctant anti-hero.
But Outland does not involve eccentric villains and their secret volcano lairs. And there are no underwritten 25-year-old supermodels for Mr. Connery to make out with. Outland is a space adventure set in a mining colony on one of Jupiter's moons. But the cinematography, the production design, the lighting and sets all are similar in tone to Alien (Jerry Goldsmith even wrote the score for both films), while the plot is essentially an old fashioned frontier drama in space, famously based on the old Gary Cooper classic High Noon.
Okay, so Sean Connery is a Space Cowboy. That's cool. I'm still on board.
In fact, Connery's first line of dialogue is a threat to punch his son in the mouth. William O'Neill (Connery) is a federal marshal with a tendency to make waves, so he and his family have been sent to the ass end of space, where he's to become director of security for that mining colony I mentioned earlier. It's a grim place where the miners work long hours, cut off from civilization for years at a time. The pay is good, but everyone has limits. If you were a kid in the early '80s you probably remember the trailer where Cliff Clavin's head explodes in his spacesuit. That happens just a few minutes in, when a desperate miner (yes, it's John Ratzenberger) gives in to hallucinations and tears his suit open.
Ordinarily this would be kind of a big deal, but a massive corporation runs the mine, and the worker complaints don't bother them nearly as much as the prospect of missing out on another year of record profits. Sheppard, the plant manager, takes it all in stride. He's a Company rock star and takes a lot of pride in (and gets a hefty cut of) those profits. He's got no time for O'Neill and his theories, and cops an immediate attitude with the Marshall. This will be important later because, you know, duh.
O'Neill's terrible, horrible, no good very bad day gets worse when his wife splits with their son. She can't handle life in space anymore, and leaves behind a Dear John letter expressing her feelings. O'Neill is devastated, but of course he doesn't show it because like all badasses, he lacks the ability to cry preferring to suppress his feelings until they explode into heinous fits of law enforcing rage. Luckily, the string of suicides continues, so the Marshall gets to channel his righteous indignation into unravelling why anyone whose job is breaking rocks in a spacesuit under unsafe conditions for years at a time 360 million miles from home could possibly want to kill themselves.
Of course there's more to it than this, and after forging an unlikely alliance with the plant's crusty doctor (Frances Sternhagen), his persistence is rewarded. There's a deeper reason for the deaths, courtesy of some extremely funny business happening right under Sheppard's nose. It looks like the Company put O'Neill out to pasture in the wrong place, because the guy just can't stop himself from turning over every rock he finds. Now, the bitter old lawman has to choose between walking away, and standing up for what's right. With no allies and no resources, you'd think that would be a no brainer. But for the first time in years, O'Neill finds himself with something worth fighting for.
Yeah, Gary Cooper already made this movie, but he didn't make it IN SPACE. And like all good Westerns, Outland is chock full of sharp, meaningful dialogue that provides unvarnished insight into everyone's character. It's a classic tale of men and morals, in what was at the time a rather novel setting.
Speaking of the setting, I know I said this movie reminds me a little of Alien, but I don't want you to misinterpret that. Outland may actually do Alien one better for most of its runtime. It creates a mostly believable, lived-in looking world that still looks surprisingly modern today. Sure, some of the miniatures look a little like your 13-year-old nephew made them (come on, it was 1981). But everything else is well worn without being stylized (think Firefly, with its very literal interpretation of the term “space western”). It just looks pretty functional. At one point, Connery is splicing fiber optic cable, and it actually looks like something that maybe you could really do.
Like any frontier town, the station itself is one of the most important characters. Its massive labyrinth of corridors and chambers is big enough to hold thousands of people, so it really is literally a city in space. There's a sheriff, a big bad heavy, and plenty of room for his goons to play cat and mouse with the dogged lawman. Connery himself is serviceable in the role, playing his part with mostly convincing restraint. All the characters are archetypes, so while I can't imagine anyone found the script challenging, the performances fit the story and the setting as well as you could hope for.
I'm not saying Outland has aged flawlessly over the course of three decades. There are a lot of shoulder pads, obvious matte paintings, and a handful of shots where bits of the set look like things you might find lying around the back of a hardware store. And despite its sci-fi veneer, the type of story Outland is trying to tell - a classic Western in the “lone sheriff” motif - occasionally makes the film feel a little frivolous right when everything should mean the most. The genre clash can be jarring from time to time, and it DOES suck a lot of energy out of the story's climax.
But all this aside, Outland is a pretty solid adventure, and I'd even go so far as to call it a criminally underrated one. It's not Connery's most memorable role, and it's derivative enough that it probably doesn't deserve anything approaching the word “classic”. But it's a good movie, a good story, and it's absolutely CRYING out for a Vin Diesel/David Twohy revival. Watch Outland and tell me you can't imagine Riddick punching and slashing his way through the last half of it.
Vin Diesel in space. Wow. What a novel idea.