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| Images courtesy of Arrow Video |
When Peter Hyams’ did his 1984 sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001:
A Space Odyssey with 2010: The Year We Make Contact, it was
naturally met with scorn. How could one
try and make a sequel to one of the very best if not the greatest science
fiction film of all time? In retrospect
however, 2010 coexists not so much in Kubrick’s universe but rather the
one established by Hyams’ 1981 space-western Outland starring Sean
Connery. A drug-dealing crime thriller
of the future with High Noon leanings involving a lone hero outnumbered
and outgunned, it was a technical game changer involving state-of-the-art
visual effects technologies such as Introvision which allowed for in-camera compositing
and the Warner Brothers movie theater 5.1 sound format Megasound. Canonized by Arrow Video with their 4K UHD
release due out at the beginning of November, let us take a look at one of Sean
Connery’s best crime thrillers with a fantasy fiction bent.
On Jupiter’s moon of Io, Com-Am 27 has installed a massive
mining operation where workers slave away in limited gravity without oxygen
working in space suits. A bleak technoscape
of industrial pipes and tunnels, things are tough but running smoothly until
new Marshall William O’Niel (Sean Connery) on a tour of duty, hastily involving
leaving his wife and kid behind again, discovers a strange epidemic where
people are going crazy and acting out before dying whether it involves an
astronaut cutting off his own airliner or another man goes out into space
without a suit. Pointing towards a vast
conspiracy involving the general manager Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle) who has
been drugging his workers with a powerful amphetamine for faster results, O’Niel
finds himself on his own against a corrupt police system before he learns
through a pilfered broadcast Sheppard hired a group of gunman to come to the mining
operation and silence him with his only ally being a cantankerous middle-aged Dr.
Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen).
A striking space-western with still-stunning visual effects
by John Stears and William Mesa’s Introvision process allowing scenes of Sean
Connery in a spacesuit to evade gunman from below deck in the same widescreen
shot, lensed beautifully by Stephen Goldblatt in Peter Hyams’ time-honored
penchant for shooting only using available light resulting in a somewhat washed
out but nevertheless organically grainy look, Outland is much like Blade
Runner a curiously picturesque dose of science-fiction as Neo-noir. Between Never Say Never Again production
designer Philip Harrison’s sets which would inevitably pave the way for the
look of Paul Verhoeven’s Total Recall and beset by a rather Alien sounding
spooky score by Jerry Goldsmith, the feel of the world is ominous, unpleasant
and above all sterilized with scenes of Connery running down corridors that
look very like the ones traversed by Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Where the film really shines however is not with any of the
technical brouhaha but rather how it plays off of the initially contentious but
gradually mutually respectful camaraderie of Sean Connery and Frances Sternhagen. For anyone who remembers Sternhagen’s turn in
The Mist who famously chucks a can of peas at Marcia Gay Harden’s head,
she makes the cranky middle-aged doctor into the closest thing Connery has had
to an older Bond girl who fights by his side with him against the assassins who
have come to kill him. Only Peter Boyle
as the sleazy general manager hidden behind a beard and baseball cap looking like
Yaphet Kotto from Alien seems underutilized but the initial hook with
Connery and Sternhagen is so strong we forgive it.
Released in 1981 in less than 350 theaters to try and build
an audience following via word of mouth before deciding to expand the release,
the $14 million film rolled out in 70mm prints with 6-track magnetic audio took
in somewhere around $20 million which wasn’t a huge but nevertheless modest
profit. The film garnered an Academy Award
nomination for Best Sound, something Arrow Video has taken pains to maintain in
both lossless 2.0 stereo and 5.1 surround mixes. Critical opinions were mixed with many citing
the obvious influence of High Noon while also being characterized as
another quasi-Bond iteration with Sean Connery.
On home video, it saw numerous iterations including a widescreen tape
release and a remastered laserdisc followed by a DVD with 5.1 surround
sound. Following a blu-ray port of the
same by Warner Brothers, it goes without saying Arrow Video have done a full
blown 4K restoration and UHD disc release for Outland in the highest fashion
replete with archival as well as brand new commentaries, newly filmed extras,
an illustrated collector’s booklet and double-sided foldout poster, making this
the definitive home video release of this underrated space western.
--Andrew Kotwicki
