If “the only effective answer to organized greed is organized labor,” as AFL-CIO leader Thomas Donahue suggested, then we live in truly ineffective times, something envisaged by Peter Hyams’ 1981 film, Outland. Arrow Video has celebrated the film with a 4K reissue, and revisiting it four decades later is somewhat surprising. While Outland suffers from some shallow writing and a litany of logical flaws, it’s a surprisingly, almost radically class-conscious picture.
The ideological underpinnings of Outland are understandable, considering the film is a revamp of Fred Zinnemann’s Western classic, High Noon (1952). That film’s controversial critique of McCarthyism got its writer blacklisted, something Hyams was familiar with; his stepfather, the conductor Arthur Lief, was blacklisted after refusing to name names.
Hyams, who calls himself “a red diaper baby” in one of the special features because of his far-left parents, incorporated his political beliefs into several of his films, but with a distinctly post-Watergate cynicism. That was the case with Hyams’ masterpiece, Capricorn One (1977), and it remained the case with Outland. With an existential Marxism reminiscent of Jean-Paul Sartre, the film explores many of the same questions as High Noon but ultimately, and perhaps intentionally, fails to answer them.
Outland stars Sean Connery as William O’Niel, the new marshal at a successful corporate mining colony on one of Jupiter’s moons. He refuses to look the other way when he discovers that the general manager (Peter Boyle) has been running a drug smuggling operation and has been feeding his employees intense amphetamines that increase their production on a short-term basis but bring about dangerous psychosis in the long term.
Another nice surprise: Connery is excellent as O’Niel, playing him with a world-weariness devoid of any suave and sensual “James Bond” mannerisms. He grounds the character in his categorical imperative, evincing O’Niel’s morality without any maudlin melodrama or showboating. Connery brings a working-class sensibility to the character, which is otherwise underwritten like every other character. In fact, the performances do the heavy lifting across the board, rescuing a script filled with one-dimensional characters and sometimes silly dialogue.
Boyle is always good at playing scumbags, and plays the outpost’s manager with an interesting practicality, and James B. Sikking is compassionate and sad as a fellow officer. Frances Sternhagen is the standout, however, delivering a delightfully cantankerous performance as Dr. Lazarus, O’Niel’s only ally at the outpost. Like others who find work there, she has a history of failure and is probably unemployable elsewhere, so she accepts the corruption and poor working conditions.
Unfortunately, Outland‘s final act is a let-down, and the assassins who are sent to kill O’Neil are ridiculously stupid. That’s especially disappointing after a strong section where Hyams builds tension by explicitly leaning on the aesthetic and editing of High Noon, with O’Niel attempting to get help before a shuttle arrives carrying his potential assassins.
As such, Outland‘s similarities to High Noon are manifold: one marshal fights for his community despite their refusal to fight alongside him; the only help he finds is from an unexpected woman; there is a countdown to his showdown with villains sent to eliminate him. Both films frequently incorporate ticking clocks into their imagery and spend a good deal of time in a crowded bar (including the requisite scene where a hush descends when the marshal enters). Hell, both marshals are even named Will.
However, the differences between Outland and High Noon are what make Hyams’ film interesting. Most obviously, and perhaps least significantly, are the vastly different settings. While both films explore the violence of new colonial frontiers, Outland is set in the wild west of outer space and almost entirely within the claustrophobic corporate lunar factory.
The mining outpost is wonderfully realized, largely thanks to production designer Philip Harrison and the brilliant art director Malcolm Middleton, who went on to perfect the junky future realism of Outland with Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men (2006) Calling the film “Jacobean sci-fi”, critic Pauline Kael described the set design of Outland as “an erector-set honey comb — functionalism divorced from all civility”.
That’s especially true of some excellent dolly shots that slowly revel in the industrial production design’s punctilious detail. Hyams and a young Stephen Goldblatt, near the start of his acclaimed cinematography career, make the most of the junkyard jungle gym of their sets. They use a serpentine chase scene to cogently chart the area, fluidly exploring the grids of cage-like living quarters where miners are stacked on top of each other.
The gritty manufacturing design of Outland complements its themes of labor, greed, exploitation, and corruption. The title of the film immediately brings to mind the term “uitlander”, which refers to the migrant laborers who worked as gold miners in South Africa and were heavily exploited. Indeed, the very first bit of dialogue in Outland is between two miners practicing some job consciousness by complaining about their ineffective shop steward, the bylaws of their union’s constitution, and their understaffed working conditions. (Outland may be the only science-fiction film about workplace injuries.)
Thus, while High Noon is allegorical and can be a political Rorschach test – it was Ronald Reagan’s favorite film, yet it was denounced by the USSR – Outland is utterly literal in its depiction of corrupt corporations and worker exploitation. As it should be, considering its contemporary context. Just a few months after Outland was released, American air traffic controllers went on a massive strike. Reagan ordered the firing of every worker in a brutal move that would mark a turning point for labor relations.
Labor power was essentially deflated in the 1980s, with the failure of workers’ movements, such as the 1984 mining strike in the United Kingdom, leading to increasingly decimated unions. Perhaps it’s appropriate, then, that Outland ends rather anticlimactically. Maybe the ultimate meaninglessness of O’Niel’s actions is also fitting, rather than further evidence of a weak script.
In the end, like most art, its reception depends upon your politics and charity. Seeing Outland as an aesthetically cool and unique sci-fi western that’s let down by a bad script and no neatly tied-up ending is a reasonable analysis. It’s more interesting and fun, though, to actively engage with the film, to see O’Niel as a sort of deontological hero embracing his agency to resist a practico-inert system.
As an aforementioned “red diaper baby”, Hyams knows that O’Niel and every other cog in the wheels of capital are unlikely to affect the system and enact much change. O’Niel persists despite this knowledge, engaging in praxeology not to start a revolution but to live with himself. It’s hard work.