New at BOP: Review: Matrix Resurrections Movie Review: Moonfall Movie Reviews: Scream The #1 Movie in America November Forecast The Many Saints of Newark October Forecast New Trivia Question All site updates Share & Save   Tweet Print this column

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.

Continued:       1       2