Outland: Marshal O’Nonsense and the Dirty Space Dozen (classic SF film retrospective).
There’s a moment in Outland (1981) when Sean Connery’s beleaguered space Marshal, eyebrows doing most of the acting, stares down a corridor of a filthy mining outpost on Jupiter’s moon Io, and you realise: this isn’t just a science fiction film. It’s a Western. A very sweaty Western. In space. With depressurised heads exploding like overripe tomatoes. Which, let’s be honest, you don’t get much of in High Noon. Let’s enjoy our Damn Fine Stan Fine’s video take on this classic flick, above.
Directed by Peter Hyams (he of Capricorn One and 2010: The Year We Made a Sequel Because Kubrick Wouldn’t), Outland is a gloomy, grindingly industrial thriller that mashes up frontier justice with blue-collar futurism. It’s Alien without the alien, High Noon with less sun, and Zardoz with significantly more trousers. For that alone, it deserves applause.
Sean Connery stars as Marshal William O’Niel; occasionally spelled O’Neil, depending on whether the props department had their spellcheck turned on. He’s been assigned to the mining colony Con-Am 27, where the air is toxic, the crew is twitchy, and the cafeteria probably serves asbestos pudding. Within minutes of arrival, O’Niel realises that the “accidental” deaths among the workers are anything but. He’s got the dead eyes of a man who’s seen this before, and the moustache of someone who’s absolutely not taking your nonsense.
What follows is a noir-tinged mystery that becomes a standoff. O’Niel uncovers a drug smuggling ring that’s juicing the miners with amphetamines so they can work 40-hour shifts without blinking—until they spectacularly implode, literally. The drugs are good for productivity, bad for cranial stability. Naturally, the General Manager (played with bureaucratic sleaze by Peter Boyle) is in on it. Because in space, no one can hear you file a formal grievance.
Connery is left to face the company’s hitmen alone. His wife has already taken their son back to Earth (sensible), the miners won’t help (cowardly), and even the station’s AI is probably sulking. His only ally is a gloriously irritable doctor played by Frances Sternhagen, whose bedside manner could blister paint. She is, arguably, the real MVP of the film, dispensing sarcasm and sedatives in equal measure.
What makes Outland worth revisiting, apart from its magnificently analogue model work and relentlessly grimy sets, is its tone. It’s not shiny science fiction. There are no wisecracking robots or implausibly clean starships. This is the underbelly of the space age, the working-class off-world rig, where capitalism has extended its reach past the asteroid belt and nobody’s washed a window in 30 years.
The cinematography is all steel greys and moody blues, the lighting oppressive, the spacesuits laughably unwieldy. The action is slow-burn and deliberate. When violence erupts, it’s messy and ugly—one poor soul gets depressurised and becomes instant soup. The guns fire tiny darts. The villains arrive on a shuttle with all the fanfare of a courier service. And Connery? He scowls and smoulders like a man who’s had to do this on the Scottish Highlands, the Bahamas, and now in zero-G.
Here at SFcrowsnest, we have a soft spot for these sorts of films: grubby, grounded, and quietly bonkers. Outland was a box office underachiever at the time, dismissed by many as just “High Noon in space.” Which is like calling Blade Runner “Casablanca with photocopiers.” It misses the point entirely.
Because Outland is more than just a genre pastiche. It’s a bleak little warning about corporate overreach, the dehumanisation of labour, and the loneliness of doing the right thing when no one else gives a damn. Also, it’s got Connery with a shotgun in a pressure dome, which really ought to be a genre all of its own.
So dust off your VHS copy (or the Blu-ray, if you’re fancy), lower the lights, and prepare to descend once again into the grim corridors of Con-Am 27. Bring oxygen. And a large glass of whisky. Connery would approve.
