Outland is a rare thing, a big-budget Hollywood film grounded in realistic science-fiction. No flashy lasers, easy space travel, weird aliens, or psychic powers, it is a gritty, grounded vision of the future. The aesthetic is industrial tinged with futurism, the sets feel lived in, the fighting is visceral, the spacesuit walks are entirely believable. But from this comes its major failing, and I suspect the reason why it underperformed in cinemas.
It started off as a Western, and it shows. Until the climax, when creative use is made of Io's thin atmosphere, there is little about this story that could not be easily transplanted to any other company town of the past two hundred years. The setting ends up feeling like a wasted backdrop. The writer wanted to focus on the human element, but plenty of classic hard science fiction stories, like those of Robert Heinlein, show that you can combine human conflicts with innovative ways for those conflicts to play out. It makes no use of what was known about Io at the time.
And here's the real problem: it's a retread of High Noon with neither charm nor credibility. It tries to humanise our hero by giving him a family, but we see them only for a few minutes on a grainy screen. He has much better chemistry with the station's doctor and I wish they had done more with it (indeed, casting a woman alongside Sean Connery who looks about his age is almost as iconoclastic as the setting).
And then there are all the plausibility questions from the plot. We have to believe that our hero is unable to find any allies in his police work, but also is such a threat that the company takes a huge risk in assassinating him instead of obstructing or dismissing him by legal means. That a hitman operating in space doesn't know the dangers of shooting a hole in an exterior wall. The deputy has "will betray you in the climax" written all over him. The worst is the huge countdown that takes up so much of the third act: it does nothing to raise tension and really just underlines how artificial the setup is. High Noon was more stylised; this plot doesn't work when everything is so much grittier.
It might have worked better as a television show, giving it more time to flesh out characters and setting and offering more varied stories, but I know they could not have those sets on a television budget. It's a filmmaking curio, but it could have been so much more.
The daring setting only draws attention to a very safe story
Outland is a rare thing, a big-budget Hollywood film grounded in realistic science-fiction. No flashy lasers, easy space travel, weird aliens, or psychic powers, it is a gritty, grounded vision of the future. The aesthetic is industrial tinged with futurism, the sets feel lived in, the fighting is visceral, the spacesuit walks are entirely believable. But from this comes its major failing, and I suspect the reason why it underperformed in cinemas.
It started off as a Western, and it shows. Until the climax, when creative use is made of Io's thin atmosphere, there is little about this story that could not be easily transplanted to any other company town of the past two hundred years. The setting ends up feeling like a wasted backdrop. The writer wanted to focus on the human element, but plenty of classic hard science fiction stories, like those of Robert Heinlein, show that you can combine human conflicts with innovative ways for those conflicts to play out. It makes no use of what was known about Io at the time.
And here's the real problem: it's a retread of High Noon with neither charm nor credibility. It tries to humanise our hero by giving him a family, but we see them only for a few minutes on a grainy screen. He has much better chemistry with the station's doctor and I wish they had done more with it (indeed, casting a woman alongside Sean Connery who looks about his age is almost as iconoclastic as the setting).
And then there are all the plausibility questions from the plot. We have to believe that our hero is unable to find any allies in his police work, but also is such a threat that the company takes a huge risk in assassinating him instead of obstructing or dismissing him by legal means. That a hitman operating in space doesn't know the dangers of shooting a hole in an exterior wall. The deputy has "will betray you in the climax" written all over him. The worst is the huge countdown that takes up so much of the third act: it does nothing to raise tension and really just underlines how artificial the setup is. High Noon was more stylised; this plot doesn't work when everything is so much grittier.
It might have worked better as a television show, giving it more time to flesh out characters and setting and offering more varied stories, but I know they could not have those sets on a television budget. It's a filmmaking curio, but it could have been so much more.