You know, if you're the guy you're supposed to be, you wouldn't stick around. That's why they sent you here.
Outland
(1981)
Sean Connery does
High Noon in space (on Io, anyway) by way of post-Alien design and visuals.
Peter Hyams isn't quite a journeyman
director (until the last couple of decades he regularly directed his own
screenplays, and he usually doubles as cinematographer) but he's too derivative
and safe a pair of hands to approach any kind of auteur status.
His peak run is probably the Capricorn One/Outland/2010 sci-fi
trilogy. Hyams mimics the look of Alien
very effectively (he’s open about this on the Blu-ray commentary), such that
the film feels like a halfway house on the way to Blade Runner (you'd swear the bar, complete with podiums of
semi-nude dancers, is an outtake). Jerry Goldsmith's score frequently makes use
of eerie Alien-esque cues and the
tagline "Even in space, the ultimate
enemy is man" is a pretty shameless attempt to sell it to that
audience (there's even a final log sign-off, except that it's altogether cheesy
in this case). The expansion of the used future, bored-with-space blue-collar
crew into this film's mining colony works rather well; Connery's kid has never
even seen Earth, and the staff live in drudgery only alleviated by hookers and
drugs.
Where Hyams fails is in character and
detail, so he's lucky to have Sean to take up the slack. We never really get to
know the opposition to Connery's resolute Marshall. Peter Boyle's character is
loyal to what he can graft at the expense of the workers and also represents
the profit-first face of the company (the same one that featured in Capricorn One), but there isn't enough
of him to effectively counterpoint Connery. The drug that is sending crew crazy
is given almost perfunctory attention (having Steven Berkoff go crazy on it is astute
casting, though). And even in terms of the High
Noon - waiting for the assassins to arrive - aspect, the only character
Connery really interacts with is Frances Sternhagen's feisty doctor (she's
excellent, even if her dialogues is occasionally a bit ripe). Jame Sikking
makes a good showing as one of Connery's men and there's a significant role for
a very young Clark Peters (Lester in The Wire).
So what you're left with is a serviceable
imitation of better movies (it even has exploding heads a la Scanners) that comes into its own in one
area; the Scotsman. He's on great form, taking no shit and proving that Shatner
isn't the only actor whose toupee doesn’t detach in space.
***1/2
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