OUTLAND
MOVIE REVIEW

		Review by E.C. McMullen Jr.
OUTLAND - 1981 USA Release: May 22, 1981 The Ladd Company, Warner Bros. Rating: USA: R

OUTLAND

The credit opening is reminiscent of 20th Century Fox's ALIEN.

If that's what you think when watching it, good. Mission accomplished because that's what you are supposed to think.

The slow title reveal of the movie, to it being superimposed upon the space background, to the music that is clearly inspired by Composer Gustav Holst's The Planets, yet composed by Jerry Goldsmith, who composed the music for ALIEN, makes this feel like a sequel to ALIEN.

That's no accident because Writer and Director Peter Hyams (CAPRICORN ONE, THE STAR CHAMBER, 2010, TIMECOP, THE RELIC, END OF DAYS, A SOUND OF THUNDER) as well as The Ladd Company that funded this, all want you to think of this movie as existing in the same universe as ALIEN.

However, this is not ALIEN1.

Trailer Narration by Roscoe Lee Browne

There are none of Ridley Scott's space truckers here, but there are space miners, mining who knows what from the moon, Io. Io has a moon colony of miners run by a private company that has a commercial contract with some kinda consortium of earth industries.

!!!SCIENCE MOMENT!!!:
Io orbits Jupiter at a distance of around 400,000 kilometers, give or take a few tens of thousands of kilometers, due to its highly elliptical orbit (Damn you, Europa!!! You're cool though, Ganymede! I dunno, there's just something about you.). Jupiter bathes its little moon with ten times the radiation deemed safe for humans. The humans may live deep within the moon, but they work long hours outside wearing nothing more than a spacesuit.

How does that work? Who knows? They don't address it and its something we can't do today, but figuring it out is not impossible. Like earth's moon, Io always faces one side toward Jupiter and the other away, so maybe that has something to do with it. On the other hand, due to tidal forces ...

You know what? If yer really that interested in Io, read NASA's Io Facts.

For the purpose of this review, let's just say that future earth tech advances solved the logistics problem of people-ing this space pebble.

So the miners work and as they do they bitch about this, gripe about that, and are concerned about robots taking over their jobs.

Suddenly one of them, that the other miners call Tarlow (John Ratzenberger: TWILIGHT'S LAST GLEAMING, WARLORDS OF THE DEEP, MOTEL HELL, BATTLETRUCK, TIMESTALKERS, HOUSE II, MONSTERS, INC., THE INCREDIBLES, COCO, INCREDIBLES 2), starts freaking out about spiders being in his suit. His work mates hear him but shine him on. There are no spiders on Io. Mars, maybe, but not Io!

Now stop kidding around and get back to work!

Tarlow the Freakout guy immediately shows everyone how serious he is and Merry Mishaps occur.

John Ratzenberger, as Tarlow, gives his 30 second bit everything he's got.

This looks like a job for the new Marshall!

Marshall William T. O'Neill (Sean Connery: ZARDOZ, MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS, METEOR, TIME BANDITS, HIGHLANDER, INDIANA JONES AND THE LAST CRUSADE, THE LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN) and his wife and son, have only been on the mining colony for two weeks. Marshals apparently keep earth laws from being broken or discarded by the companies who run the mining colonies. So far, O'Neill doesn't know anyone outside of his own department and already there is a suspicious death.

The death is made all the more suspicious because colony doctor didn't do an autopsy. Whenever "these things" happen the company immediately transports the corpse off the moon. In fact, the body already left on the last shuttle of the day.

Wait! Whattya mean, "these things"?

According to the colony's Doctor, Marion Lazarus (Francis Sternhagen: COMMUNION, MISERY, GOLDEN YEARS, RAISING CAIN, THE MIST), Seems such far flung space colonies of temporary workers doesn't attract the most elite crowds. Most of the folks work on Io are repeat criminals. Such work under such dangerous conditions are their last chance to make anything of their lives and its not uncommon for such folks to crack under pressure.

The Marshall sniffs a mystery but whatever clues he's looking for, the Doctor admits she won't be much help. Earth's best and finest won't be found scrapping for existence on the far flung mining moons of the solar system. Speaking of which, what brought you here, Marshall?

Marshal: Nunya biz, iz what. Now I would like a report of all of these incidents that have happened during the past six months.

Don't get me wrong. The Ladd Company weren't going cheap.
They really thought they had a great movie here.

Back at his apartment, William discovers that his wife Carol (Kika Markham: BUNNY LAKE IS MISSING, ARMCHAIR THRILLER [TV], FRANKLYN) and son Paul (Nicholas Barnes) were on that last shuttle. Carol swears that she still loves him, and only him, but she's left him and for good reason: Their son will be teenager soon. Paul was born on a spaceship and has spent his whole young life growing up on various mining colonies, each worse than the last. He's never had friends his own age, never lived outside of a confined space that had bottled air, has spent his life sheltered in one cramped apartment after the next away from drunk miners, prostitutes, and always under the threat of spaceship or mining colony exploding.

Paul spends his free time looking t photos and videos of earth. Yet he's never been to earth and that's where Carol is taking him. She hopes that her husband will join them, as they have to wait at the space station for the next shuttle to earth.

With everything to lose and nothing tangible to gain, a heartbroken William chooses to stay.

Which means we've got the movie High Noon, but in space! And yes, the movie plays out in just that way.

Look at this! A graphic novel both written and illustrated by the great Jim Steranko.
ALIEN had a Movie Graphic Novel, so OUTLAND gets a Movie Graphic Novel.
The Ladd Company, nowhere near the size of 20th Century Fox,
still pulled out all of the stops for this movie.

Though Written and Directed by Peter Hyams, and despite all of the latest SFX toys of the time from IntroVision process to Megasound System format, this movie lives and dies by the acting of Sean Connery alone. Yes Peter Boyle (YOUNG FRANKENSTEIN, DISASTER AT SILO 7, SOLAR CRISIS, THE SHADOW, SWEET EVIL, SCOOBY-DOO 2) also stars in this, but his screen time is maybe 5 minutes of the film, tops. The same goes for Dr. Lazarus. In fact, Marshal O'Neill's second in command, Sergeant Montone (James Sikking: THE STRANGLER, DADDY'S GONE A-HUNTING, THE NIGHT GOD SCREAMED, THE ASTRONAUT, THE TERMINAL MAN, CAPRICORN ONE, THE STAR CHAMBER, STAR TREK III: THE SEARCH FOR SPOCK, SEDUCED BY EVIL, INVASION AMERICA [TV]) probably doesn't have that much.

I get that the movie is supposed to be about a mining colony full of ne'er-do-wells, the bottom feeders of society who are out in the far reaches of space and on their last legs (the movie hammers this point home). But the dialog is wince-worthy awkward throughout. Sean is burdened with the same dialog but as an actor of some caliber he makes it work by his timing and delivery. He doesn't just recite the bad script, he infuses his delivery with the experience and mistakes of an aging man who is questioning himself at the worst possible time in his life - again, like Gary Cooper's mysterious and friendless character of Marshal Will Kane in High Noon, who defends a town of cowards from the bad guys.

So popular that the following year, Paramount released Shane, about a mysterious and friendless character who defends a town of cowards from the bad guys. And this obvious riff also became a hit!

Now sure, High Noon, considered one of the Top Five Westerns ever made, is nowhere near as popular now as it once was. But when OUTLAND came out in 1981, High Noon from 1952 was still mega popular after 29 years. We Horror fans get that: Look how popular the original FRIDAY THE 13th from 1980 still is. Or HALLOWEEN from 1978.

What's more, just as those movies had a long string of sequels, so High Noon had a ton of homages besides Shane. In the 1950s through the 1970s hey day of TV Westerns from Gunsmoke to Little House on the Prairie, hardly a season went by on any of them where they didn't do their version of High Noon. In theaters, Clint Eastwood Westerns were nothing but versions of High Noon/Shane mashups.

Hell, Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles mocked it!

In OUTLAND, they were so On the Nose as to have swinging doors at the entrance of their space saloons. Sheesh!

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not crapping on movies or stories that are inspired from older stories. Stephen King has practically built his entire career on selling his version of someone else's story and you don't get much more successful than him.

The difference here is, King's self-aware killer machines like in MAXIMUM OVERDRIVE or CHRISTINE launched from novellas like Theodore Sturgeon's 1945 story, KILLDOZER! or Dennis Shryack and Michael Butler's 1976 story, THE CAR: they didn't imitate them. Launch is the key word as King's stories go to places the originals never did, and he's not alone. Bram Stoker invented Dracula, he didn't invent the vampire. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's Frankenstein was her take on the mythic Golem.

Making matters worse is the bad dialog, and I lost track of all the preposterous plot holes, like -

Hey gang! Let's have lights inside our helmets, shining at our eyes, that will improve our night vision in all of this dark we work in!

Or,

Hey gang! Let's have our best Space Hitmen get in a gunfight inside the glass sealed passageway that keeps us alive! Oh Noes! Our gunfire shattered the glass!

Okay! Well, let's do it again in the glass greenhouse but be more careful! Oh Noes!

Some things don't get better with age and OUTLAND is one of them.

That said, the concept remains good, making OUTLAND Ripe for Remake!

Two Shriek Girls

This review copyright 2025 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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