"OUTLAND is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment." - Vincent Canby

OUTLAND (1981) - ***1/2

What is up with my kick in reviewing Peter Hyams? Sure I've written numerous supposed reasons why, but I actually don't know why? Here are two new ones: I've always been enticed about completely reviewing a director's lengthy filmography, and quite frankly, I'm inspired by the reality that nobody else will bother to do this. Maybe for Scorsese or Bergman or whatever, but Hyams? People don't care about him, and those that do including me, I can count on a hand. Or one finger.

With Hyams, I had reviewed the good (THE RELIC), the bad (STAY TUNED), and neither (THE MUSKETEER), but there was one picture I've been eyeing for a long time in OUTLAND. Maybe it's the gimmick of a western in outer space, maybe it stars Sean Connery in an alleged underrated Hyams action effort, or maybe...look at that poster. Connery with his crew cut wearing a short sleeve, baby blue colored shirt and big shiney gold bage...Connery looks an awful lot like that 1980s WWF pro wrestler the Big Bossman.



So I'm intrigued by several fronts in checking out OUTLAND, but that little bastard eluded me real good for months. Somehow I keep missing OUTLAND on television, and of course none of my local video stores have it, especially fucking Blockbuster. After I put that DVD in my queue, Netflix yanks it from circulation. Then they streamed it for their Instant digital service, but by the time I got around to watch it, they pull OUTLAND once again and their DVD is still MIA. I'm fustrated and quite annoyed. Then by dumb luck yesterday, I found it at the Big Lots bargain bin for $3 and bought that sunumbitch. The point of this story: hey Netflix, don't go Blockbuster on us.

Now in my eighth(!) review of a Hyams picture, we finally have OUTLAND and it was well worth the wait for this is Hyams' best effort I've reviewed yet. Unlike RELIC the former champion, OUTLAND is better produced, better looking, better acted, and much more entertaining. I'm greatly reminded of that sleeper blockbuster hit TAKEN from earlier this year. Like TAKEN (or THE RELIC for that matter), Hyams' OUTLAND has some very basic thematic goals to accomplish here without any self-denying pretentious bullshit, and it gets the fucking job done. This isn't for everyone, only for those in the mood for a movie where Sean Connery plays a shotgun-wielding space cop.

I think the best complement that can be said for OUTLAND came from that quote above the review given by the late great New York Times critic Canby, who wasn't exactly an easy-pleasing unsophisticated action nerd like RRA. See? OUTLAND has pretentious street cred up in the Big Apple, yo! Of course he and Roger Ebert were the rare mainstream critic who liked Brian DePalma's SCARFACE back in the day, so according to some people's standards, those three including me review shit films.

You'll notice right away that like RELIC, Hyams in his approach for OUTLAND was obviously influenced by Sir Ridley Scott's ALIEN, but it's even more overt than just mere imitatory thriller filmatics. You have the giant slowly-revealing title behind the credits, a plot involving an evil money-hungry interstellar corporation, a blue collar labor mentality, dirty and worn out industralized future machines, etc. Shit Hyams even hired ALIEN composer Jerry Goldsmith to score OUTLAND. An underrated job in fact, much like his LEGEND soundtrack.

The difference is simple. People like scripter Dan O'Bannon, producer Walter Hill, and director Scott put a slasher horror flick in a science fiction setting, and ALIEN is a genuine recognized classic in both genres. OUTLAND recreated the dying western, specifically HIGH NOON, with a sci-fi flavor...and it's not that speical in either cinema tradition. If ALIEN pushed and defined the expectation boundaries, OUTLAND is comfrotable playing the same ole schtick, and has fun with it.

OUTLAND opens on the Jupiter moon Io, the home of the most productive mining base where several workers have gone insane during the job (drilling out the rocky landscape in astronaut suits) and go suicidal by exposing themselves to the space vacuum. More than once, Hyams makes sure to show us that the human body doesn't handle space decompression very well to highlight this fatal danger, and an excuse to display some bloody good special effects. New marshal Connery investigates, and if you already figured out that the high quotas has something to do with the alarming body count, then terrific.

You win a cookie.

OUTLAND certainly embraces it's western roots, with the larger-than-life personalities (Connery the badass and Peter Boyle the company villain), the rowdy saloon, the legalized brothel, fists used to enforce the law, the evil corrupt official and his army of violent goons, the isolating deary environment, the bored town doctor (Frances Sternhagen) who becomes the hero's sole ally, you name it. Specifically OUTLAND goes HIGH NOON with the action-packed climatic showdown between Boyle's hired gunmen and the lonely Connery, abandoned by his fellow cops and miners. There Will be blood!

I might be alone in saying this, but in some ways OUTLAND actually improves western conventions with the different curtains. While it's unlikely in 1850s Kansas, conceivably you could escape by horse or foot out of a jam. You can't exactly do that in space, so Connery either has to give up or fight. Then there is two plotting customs in such tales. First the wife/lover inevitably leaving the hero (before reuniting by the end credits) but OUTLAND handles this cleverly. Stuck for years in the same dull, gray overcrowding bases with the same rationed food and entertainment, wouldn't you eventually yearn in nostalgia for the green lively Earth? I would, and I appreciate that Hyams programs Connery to be sympathetic to that emotionalism. I dig that. So our planet is the new East Coast, see?

Second, when the concerning Sternhagen asks Connery why he is stubborn about standing up to the upcoming onslaught...yeah you usually get a hokey speech of how the hero is resolute because it's the right thing to do or no one else will do it. It's hard to come up with a valid and genuine reason without resorting to contrived nonsensical-macho cliches this side of John Wayne, but I thought Connery gives a pretty good argument:

"They sent me here to this pile of shit because they think I belong here. I want to find out if... well if they're right. There's a whole machine that works because everybody does what they are supposed to. And I found out... I was supposed to be something I didn't like. That's what's in the program. That's my rotten little part in the rotten machine. I don't like it. So I'm going to find out if they're right."

With Connery reciting this dialogue, you response is "well of course!"

As I touched upon briefly earlier, I also liked the sets. Like ALIEN they are designed with some intelligence in being practical instead of looking cool, and they look like dwellings and public space that people of this supposed future would actually visit, work, and loiter. There's even a large clock to time the weekly shuttle supply visits, which to my surprise (somehow) it becomes the ominous countdown to the arrival of the mercenaries. Also in Io's jails, prisoners are suspended in air between the ceiling and floor of their cells. I'm surprised Guantanamo never implemented that method.

But this western-trasfusion isn't totally successful. In the confrontation with the last henchman, a thrilling finale fight in space suits outside on a power transformer, there just isn't the magic of the classic ghost town, where the spatial geography is more open to your immediate imagination, instead of some building which randomly pops up. I also wonder how the shotgun survived intact in engineering evolution to this supposed future, but I guess a laser gun just isn't as cool. And they're right.

Also OUTLAND also employs some easy storytelling cheats. How does Connery assume the alliance between a dirty cop and Boyle by observing them? Oh right, gut instinct. Also, if Boyle and the company owns and built that moon facility...wouldn't they have made sure that the comprehensive surveillance system not fall easily into the hands of any goodie two-shoes cop? Much less mother fucking James Bond? At least ROBOCOP computed around that plothole, where the corporation installed self-protecting technological insurance. Of course this is Hyams, who by rule of thumb, isn't that creative around defeating conventional expectations.

And yet, I'm reminded again of why Connery can be awesome. With his last few years becoming a parody of himself, he was always suited for such physical charisma-demanding role because more than anything else, he looked like he could kick your ass. That is before he became a senior citizen, and it became laughable. Still, OUTLAND was before he started collecting social security checks. He gives one unfortunate lackey one of the better bloody broken noses I've seen in awhile, and in a brutal beatdown of a drug dealer in the kitchen galley, I fully expected a repeat of Hyams' SUDDEN DEATH where Connery would dispatch him using the meat slicer or dishwasher, but no.

I'm disapointed.