Building on Alien’s depiction of futuristic working-class stiffs, Peter Hyams’s Outland moves into the realm of the space western as it follows an honest lawman attempting to keep the peace in a titanium mining colony on Io, one of Jupiter’s moons. Heavily indebted to Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, Outland updates the earlier film’s Red Scare paranoia with a more topical anxiety about growing conglomeration and capitalist power.
Upon arriving at outpost Con-Am 27, Federal Marshal William O’Niel (Sean Connery) finds that the miners there are being worked to death. Some have died from psychotic breaks induced by stimulants and the claustrophobic conditions of wearing spacesuits for long shifts. Every character, including O’Niel, is acutely aware that the mining company, represented by manager Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle), doesn’t merely exercise economic authority over the miners but also the power of life or death in the form of access to oxygen and atmospheric pressure.
Sheppard’s initial facade of laidback professionalism crumbles as the full extent of his exploitation is revealed. He acts as the kingpin for the colony’s drug underground, and whatever pay the miners get mostly finds its way back into his pockets. Quickly, O’Niel learns that anyone in a position of authority is in on this scheme. As one compromised individual warns O’Niel when the new marshal starts speaking too freely about bringing down this cartel, “You’re talking about people and places that we only know from letterheads.”
The film visualizes the moral rot of the situation with sets that betray the lack of care paid by the company to anything more than functioning upkeep of the facility. Dust and dirt seems to cake everything, even the antiseptic medical clinic. The lunar surface, lit in orange shades by Jupiter overhead, looks rusted and metallic. Both the sets and the miniature work of the facility’s exterior look colossal, but Hyams always pulls the camera back just enough to emphasize the negative space in corridors and the void of the cosmos surrounding Io, reminding us of just how small and remote this place really is for those trapped within it.
This evocative unease slowly turns into straightforward grindhouse action as O’Niel finds himself increasingly confronted by Sheppard’s circle of Pinkerton-esque breakers and assassins. Outland weathers this transition surprisingly well, leaning on Connery’s grizzled image and too-old-for-this-shit attitude to maintain its class-conscious edge while also giving in to the libidinal glee of bloody brawls and shootouts in space. Hyams seems to take a particular delight in visualizing how atmospheric decompression affects the body: One of the film’s key recurring images is a spacesuit visor suddenly turning into a fish tank filled with blood.
For all of O’Niel’s determination, the marshal often comes across more stubborn than heroic, and he scarcely spares any deeper thoughts for the workers he’s ostensibly defending than to make sure they aren’t liable to stab him in the back. Even his closest ally—a brassy, Hawksian doctor (Frances Sternhagen) who wields sarcasm as skillfully as a scalpel—regularly reminds him that the best he can hope to accomplish in taking down Sheppard is to replace one company enforcer with another. Nonetheless, Outland does find value in the struggle against corruption, however Sisyphean, if for no other reason than the satisfaction of reminding the smug overseers of capital that they are as expendable as the laborers they exploit.
Image/Sound
Sourced from Arrow’s own 4K restoration, the UHD transfer wonderfully renders the occasional pops of color in the forms of bloody reds and the orange shades of nearby Jupiter. Nonetheless, the transfer is most impressive in the many underlit scenes, where a full range of black levels can be clearly seen, and with no evidence of crushing artifacts. The presentation is impressive for its attention to the smallest details, and film grain is evenly distributed.
The disc comes with both the original stereo and a remixed surround sound track, and both ably balance centered dialogue with the sound effects of metallic clangs, echoing footfalls, and gunshots. The surround track does have a few moments where the upscaling leaves too much dead air between individual effects, but overall it’s a judiciously upscaled mix.
Extras
Arrow’s disc comes with an archival commentary by Peter Hyams and a new one by critic Chris Alexander. Hyams is more laidback, reminiscing about using the film to fulfill his longstanding desire to make a western and how the art department’s miniature work helped orient the story around a critique of corporatism, while Alexander is more analytical, carefully parsing the thematic underpinnings of the seemingly straightforward action movie.
The release also comes with new interviews with Hyams, director of photography Stephen Goldblatt, and visual effects supervisor William Mesa. Hyams repeats many of the anecdotes and insights from his commentary track, while Goldblatt and Mesa offer new perspectives on how they achieved Outland’s grimy, dystopian look.
A video essay by scholar Josh Nelson examines the film’s antihero protagonist and bleak assessment of social conformity and cowardice, and another video essay by film historian Howard S. Berger takes a larger view of Hyams’s career as a modern-day workman filmmaker able to smuggle his thematic and aesthetic interests into work-for-hire projects. A booklet contains essays by critics Priscilla Page and Brandon Streussnig, both of which unpack the film’s critique of privatization using the genre tropes of westerns and science fiction.
Overall
The subtle visual pleasures of Peter Hyams’s “High Noon in Space” cult classic have never looked better than they do on Arrow Video’s 4K UHD release.
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