Outland, 1981.
Directed by Peter Hyams.
Starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen, James B. Sikking, and Kika Markham.
SYNOPSIS:
Peter Hyams’ 1981 western sci-fi film Outland arrives on 4K Ultra HD, courtesy of Arrow Video. The company has given the movie the kind of Criterion-like treatment they’ve become known for, with over an hour’s worth of new bonus features included, along with a poster and a booklet. And the film looks great, of course.
Best described as “High Noon meets Alien,” Outland may not be one of Sean Connery’s top ten films in the eyes of many fans, but it’s still a solid thriller that delivers the goods. I have some quibbles with it, though, that I’ll get to.
Connery plays Marshal William T. O’Niel, newly arrived at a titanium ore mining outpost on Jupiter’s moon Io. His wife, Carol (Kika Markham), and son, Paul (Nicholas Barnes), have accompanied him, despite their misgivings about the job. O’Niel has bounced around the solar system on many assignments, and Paul has never experienced life on Earth, which frustrates Carol.
Meanwhile, Peter Boyle plays Mark Sheppard, the station’s boss who’s thrilled with his workers’ increased productivity, despite a recent increase in suspicious deaths. He expects O’Niel to mind his own business, of course, but the new marshal can’t help but begin investigating those cases, with reluctant help from Dr. Marian Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), who’d rather go with the company’s official assessment of the deaths.
The company in question, Con-Amalgamated, is often referred to as “the company” by the characters, which made me think of Alien, released just two years earlier. The grim-and-gritty work environment also brought about comparisons to that film, as well as the Rebel Alliance’s operations in Star Wars.
Of course, yes, High Noon is also in the mix here too, with the basic plot having been taken from that classic western, which I looked at on Blu-ray last year. And there’s a bit of police procedural in Outland as well, as O’Niel investigates the deaths and begins to realize that Sheppard has been getting more productivity out of his works via some kiind of drug that has disastrous side effects.
The train due to arrive at high noon is a supply shuttle headed from the far side of Jupiter. It carries hit men summoned by Sheppard to get rid of O’Niel, which creates the impetus for act three of this story as the marshal deals with those antagonists. One of my quibbles pops up here as one of the hit men does something incredibly stupid — I realize the sequence looks cool onscreen, but it doesn’t make much sense from a logical point-of-view.
And another quibble I have with this one is that it feels so derivative of Alien that it can be distracting, from the set design to the way characters interact with their computers. Those nitpicks aren’t enough to completely derail the movie for me, but they hold it back from potentially being viewed as a classic.
Arrow Video has issued Outland as a single 4K Ultra HD disc, with no accompanying Blu-ray, which isn’t a big deal to me. Like many movies of its vintage, some shots in Outland actually look worse in 4K, especially compared to the standard-def TV broadcast and VHS days, since the improved resolution can highlight some of the special effects’ deficiencies, but that’s just the way it is with movies this old.
In terms of extras, Arrow continues to give Criterion-like treatment to the movies it licenses, with a few new supplements, a poster, and a booklet with essays by Priscilla Page and Brandon Stressnig (Arrow only sends me check discs for their releases, so I can’t comment on the quality of any printed materials).
The first new bonus feature is a great commentary track by Chris Alexander, Fangoria editor and expert on the film. He came prepared to really dig into the film, so fans will appreciate this one. They’ll also enjoy the archival commentary by director Peter Hyams that’s included here too.
Moving on, Hyams also appears in A Corridor of Accidents: An Interview with Peter Hyams, which runs 52 minutes and adds to what the director discusses in his commentary track, although there’s some overlap, too.
The other new interviews are with the film’s director of photography Stephen Goldblatt and visual effects supervisor William Mesa, which run 29 and 34 minutes, respectively. And No Place for Heroes is a new 18-minute interview with film scholar Josh Nelson.
Finally, Hollywood Outland (21 minutes) is a hold-over from previous editions that looks at Hyams’ output from the perspective of “insider/outsider auteurism,” as filmmaker Howard S. Berger describes it. I suppose you can really describe just about any prominent serious filmmaker that way, since most of them are auteurs who tend to push back on the powers that be in Hollywood, but it’s still something to think about, as it relates to Hyams.
A pair of trailers and an image gallery round out the platter. This is my first time with Outland on home video, so I don’t know if any older bonus features are missing.
Flickering Myth Rating – Film: ★ ★ ★ / Movie: ★ ★ ★
Brad Cook
