YMMV / Outland (1981)

• Awesome Music:
  • Courtesy of the late, great Jerry Goldsmith. Here's a sample.
  • The club music, composed and performed by session musician Michael Boddicker, is also really good.
• Fanon Welding:
  • Some fans consider this an unofficial sequel to Alien, owing to the fact that it shares the same composer and production designers, as well as similar tropes (namely MegaCorp), not to mention that part of the space suits that appear in the film would be reused for the opening scene of Aliens.
  • Other fans see the film as an unofficial companion piece to Blade Runner due to its Used Future design aesthetic, similar tropes (again, MegaCorp), and the fact that both films share the same production company. Under this interpretation, the holographic dancers in the bar are, in fact, replicants.
• He Really Can Act: Sean Connery gets perhaps the most emotionally vulnerable moment of his career when O'Neil explains why he's sticking around for the showdown and after his conversation with his son.
• Narm:
  • It gets really obvious O'Niel's kid's actor was reading from a script, and the forced "mommy says..." are bad enough. Nevertheless, O'Niel's reaction makes it heartbreaking.
  • The rather goofy way people's faces inflate before exploding in a way that would make Kenshiro proud.
• Nausea Fuel: All those exploded corpses definitely qualify as such. Doubles as Nightmare Fuel, especially if you're familiar with the Byford Dolphin disaster, in which one of the divers died in that exact same manner.
• Nightmare Fuel: How the PDE affects people differently. Caine just decides out of the blue to go for a spacewalk without an environment suit. He even seals the elevator preventing other people from stopping him. The whole time he's smiling, right up to when the elevator starts its descent. The worse part being that there was no way to override the elevator controls once the airlock was sealed; all anyone who had tried to stop Caine could do was watch helplessly, knowing he wouldn't survive the trip down.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Clarke Peters as The Heavy Final Boss who fought Sean Connery to the death until his own Disney Villain Death.
  • It's a little known fact that John Ratzenberger is the miner who experienced a case of severe arachnophobia at the beginning of the movie.
  • Lowell is played by Manning Redwood, who would later be best known for playing Bob Conley in A View to a Kill.
• Special Effect Failure: The scene with the hitman getting sucked out of the greenhouse window looks very obviously superimposed. It's a bit of shame, since the greenhouse scene looks gorgeous.

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