 "This science-fiction epic delivers all the goods" (The Creature Features Movie Guide) A federal marshal on an outer-space mining colony uncovers deadly secrets, triggering a showdown. Oscar winner Sean Connery lays down the law in Peter Hyams' sci-fi sizzler. Storyline: Marshal W.T. O'Niel is assigned to a mining colony on Io, one of Jupiter's moons. During his tenure miners are dying - usually violently. When the marshal investigates he discovers the one thing all the deaths have in common is a lethal amphetamine-type drug, which allows the miners to work continuously for days at a time until they become "burned out" and expire. O'Niel follows the trail of the dealers, which leads to the man overseeing the colony. Now O'Niel must watch his back at every turn, as those who seek to protect their income begin targeting him... Written by Derek O'Cain Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben on July 4, 2012 -- When writer-director Peter Hyams kept being told he couldn't make a western, he wrote one anyway, but set it on a frontier in outer space. He called the script Io, after the moon of Jupiter on which he'd imagined an isolated mining operation where a lone marshall found himself forced to defend the principles of honesty and decency against corruption and superior numbers, armed with nothing but a shotgun, his wits and the belief that he was Doing the Right Thing. An executive of The Ladd Company, which produced the film, persuaded Hyams to change the title, after demonstrating that everyone would read it as the number ten. (They picked random people from the company halls and showed them the title page; every one of them said "ten".) The title on which they ultimately settled was Outland. As Hyams notes in his new commentary track, the space western he created was more Deadwood than The Searchers, and he gives full credit to Ridley Scott's films Alien and Blade Runner for teaching him how to depict the future in gritty, workaday imagery that let him realize a vision of how the "final frontier" might look once the galaxy was open to commercial exploitation. Gene Roddenberry also thought of westerns when he created Star Trek, but Roddenberry was an idealist who'd imagined a semi-utopian universe that had transcended capitalism. Hyams imagined something more familiar. He populated his frontier "town" with scruffy blue collar miners toiling long hours at manual labor and crowded into barracks-like dormitories. Their leisure time is spent with prostitutes or drinking in a space-age saloon with a laser light show and electronic music. No one worries about alien life forms. They worry about their hours, their bonuses and on-the-job accidents from heat, lack of oxygen and rapid decompression. Law and order are provided by hired employees of the same company that employs the miners, just as sheriffs were often hired by town authorities in the Old West. The marshall and his deputies may be there to keep the peace, but it's the company's peace. The problem arises when the company's peace and the miners' welfare come into conflict. William T. O'Niel (Sean Connery) is two weeks into his one-year tour as marshall of the Con-Am titanium mine on Io. His wife, Carol (Kika Markham), and his son, Paul (Nicholas Barnes), have come with him, because one of the perks for senior personnel is living quarters for family members. But all is not well with the O'Niel family. Carol O'Niel can no longer stand watching her son grow up on barren mining colonies, and even though she loves her husband, she abruptly leaves with Paul for the nearest space station, there to await a return flight to Earth. O'Niel carries on, bucked up by his sergeant, Montone (James B. Sikking), who relates a similar experience. Besides, O'Niel has something to investigate. Within his short time on Io, two miners have died from explosive decompression. One tore his own spacesuit open while working outside; another deliberately exposed himself to zero atmosphere without any spacesuit at all. No autopsies were performed, because there wasn't much left to examine, and the remains were immediately shipped back to the company. O'Niel finds all of this troubling and asks the company doctor, Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), to compile statistics on any similar deaths within the last six months. The relationship between Marshall O'Niel and Dr. Lazarus is essential to Outland and unlike any other in the film. They begin as adversaries and end up as respectful, if not exactly warm-hearted, friends. Hyams originally wrote the part for a specific male actor, then changed his mind and decided to cast it with a woman, without rewriting the role. On the recommendation of his sister, a casting director, he gave the part to Sternhagen, who remains a respected character actor and an accomplished theater actress. She and Connery established a unique rhythm that turned otherwise ordinary exchanges between the cranky doctor and the impatient marshall into comic relief, and also enabled the pair to become the moral center of the film. Without Lazarus, O'Niel would be a handsome action figure with family problems; with her, he becomes a hero. It's to Lazarus that O'Niel explains why he's pressing this fight, when he could simply look the other way, finish out his contract and leave to join his family: 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.It turns out there's illegal drug trafficking among the miners. The head of it all is the mine's general manager, Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle, who, according to Hyams, didn't understand his role until he saw the film cut together, at which point he thanked Hyams for giving him the part). Note that this is not a spoiler; Sheppard all but wears a "villain" sign around his neck from the moment he appears. When O'Niel tries to interfere with Sheppard's operation, the boss tries to buy off the marshall. When that doesn't work, he threatens. When that doesn't work, he attacks. When that doesn't work, he arranges for contract killers to arrive on the next weekly shuttle. O'Niel, who has been monitoring all of Sheppard's communications, has to sit and watch the clock count down to the shuttle's arrival, High Noon-style, knowing that he'll have to fight for his life. Word has been spread throughout the colony, including among his own deputies, to lay low. O'Niel is on his own. Having studied Ridley Scott's visual style for outer space in Alien, Hyams didn't just copy it, but he also added to it. His long tracking shots following miners and other personnel through colony corridors recall Scott's takes fore and aft of crew members racing around the Nostromo, but Hyams also tracks them in the vertical plane. One of his most elaborate set pieces involves O'Niel chasing a suspect on foot through the crew quarters, up stairs and down, across divides, along catwalks, eventually into the mess hall and along tabletops and then to the kitchen. The camera shots and editing choices (by future action director Stuart Baird) are designed to give a sense of movement in all directions. Even today, they hold up as a sterling example of how to edit an action sequence fast without chopping it into nonsense. The special effects pre-date the CG era and are primarily model and optical work. Individual mileage will vary, but personally I prefer them to anything I've ever seen from computer artisans. For the grimy frontier look that Hyams wanted, you can't beat real objects, even at a fraction of the scale. Fans of Outland have waited a long time. I'm not going to say "the wait was worth it", because frankly Warner shouldn't have taken so long to redo the transfer and reissue the title. But at least, when they finally did, it was done right. Highly recommended. IMDb Rating (07/05/12): 6.5/10 from 12,044 users IMDb Rating (06/02/01): 6.3/10 from 1,583 users
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