How Outland Revived A Dead Genre Through A Sci-Fi Lens
High Noon meets Alien in this forgotten Sean Connery space western.
When journeyman director and screenwriter Peter Hyams expressed a desire to make a western — just a few years after his 1977 sci-fi hit Capricorn One — the response he got was less than enthusiastic. “Everybody said, 'You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western,’” Hyams told Empire magazine. “I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion — obviously after other people — that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space.”
Hyams was right on both counts: the western in its classic form was largely box office poison by the early 1980s, but many of the tropes of the genre had found their way into science fiction films like Star Wars and its many imitators, as well as entries like Alien and Mad Max. Gleaming visions of the future had been replaced by dirty, dusty, rough-and-tumble ones — the perfect forum for Hyams’ idea for a film about life on the frontier: “I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was."
The result was Outland, starring Sean Connery as William O’Niel, a weary, vulnerable (and very un-James-Bond-like) federal marshal assigned to a year-long tour of duty at a titanium mining colony on Io, Jupiter's hellish, volcanic third moon (Hyams would return to a different Jupiter moon, Europa, three years later with his underrated 2010: The Year We Make Contact). The mine’s workers, administrators, and support staff live in a claustrophobic, grungy, warren-like base atop the mines; the conditions are so inhospitable to family life that O’Niel’s wife and young son bail after two weeks.
O’Niel is told by the general manager, Sheppard (a snarling Peter Boyle of Young Frankenstein fame), that if he toes the line and keeps order, he’ll do fine. Then a string of inexplicable suicides and bouts of insanity among the workers is traced by O’Niel to a drug that boosts one’s stamina and productivity, but ultimately leads to psychosis. The substance is being distributed by Sheppard himself — in an effort to keep the mine’s output and profits climbing — who is not about to let O’Niel get in the way, even as the latter vows to bring Sheppard’s operation down.
Outland has famously been labeled over the years as a loose remake of High Noon, and while it isn’t exactly a reimagining of that classic 1952 western, it does feature several elements of the latter film’s plot. In High Noon, Gary Cooper’s marshal must confront a gang of vicious killers, with his wife skipping out on him (although she does return) and no one in the entire town willing to stand with him, not even his own deputy. The film plays out in real time as Cooper awaits the arrival of the villains on the next train, with the clock ticking down.
The second half of Outland does not unspool in real time, but it counts down in similar fashion to the arrival of the next shuttle — which takes more than 60 hours and is bringing two assassins hired by Sheppard to take out O’Niel. His pleas for help from the workers — who like their bonuses — go unanswered, and even the law officers under his command refuse to lift a finger (his deputy even tries to kill him in the end). The only assistance he gets comes from the mining station’s cynical, misanthropic doctor (live wire Frances Sternhagen). “Don’t misconstrue this,” she tells O’Niel at one point. “I’m not displaying character. Just temporary insanity.”
The western gets a sci-fi makeover in Outland.
It’s a harsh, bleak, and unforgiving scenario — one that in many ways resembles not just High Noon but Alien, released just two years earlier. Even the opening credits and Jerry Goldsmith’s music (he scored both films) echo Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, which also featured workers encountering danger on the edge of a vast, mysterious frontier. Like Alien, Outland adds the element of worker exploitation to the High Noon scenario; just as the Weyland-Yutani corporation in Alien considers its employees expendable, Outland’s Con-Amalgamated looks the other way — even at the deaths of its workers — as long as the profits roll in.
Like O’Niel making his desperate stand, a lone hero battling the forces of greed and corruption — whether it be a monolithic bank, a land-hungry rancher, or an entire mining town — is certainly a tradition in the western genre. From Once Upon a Time In The West to High Plains Drifter to Hell or High Water, the dangers of the frontier, the exploitation of workers, and the avarice of big bosses have been woven into the fabric of the western since the genre’s earliest forays onto the big screen. With Outland, Peter Hyams proved that the same themes could make the jump from horse opera to space opera — and remain just as universal and relevant.
