cult film freak: SEAN CONNERY LEADS PETER HYAM'S SCI-FI THRILLER 'OUTLAND'

Title: OUTLAND Year: 1981 Rating: ***1/2

Known as a science-fiction version of HIGH NOON, Peter Hyam's OUTLAND... bringing the CAPRICORN ONE director from conspiracy-contrived outer-space into the real thing... is more like the galactic working-class origins of ALIEN, looking straight from the same universe with claustrophobic corridors and steely space-station interiors where a matte-painted planet... in this case Jupiter's moon Ion... looms formidably outside...

Where you could imagine disgruntled ALIEN union-types Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton working... as random likewise miners are mysteriously/violently dying like in a body-count horror flick: either by an unknown head-exploding factor or apparent suicides having to do with possible stir-craziness within the crowded off-white bunkhouse interiors, or the raunchy and pulsating, proto-BLADE RUNNER neon nightclubs...

Sean Connery in OUTLAND

A taut atmosphere curbed by a "new sheriff in town" in Sean Connery's security chief/marshall, who, with his usual slow-burn cool, eventually goes after smug corporate goon Peter Boyle, connected to a side-effect-lethal amphetamine keeping those workers working extra-hard for the big bad titanium-seeking corporation... that Connery's a rogue hero caught beneath the immense and mysterious shadow of...

As the best, most suspenseful moments occur during the initial investigation alongside sporadic bursts of action, mostly in the lawman-style shotgun-wielding cop-drama apprehension of psychotic worker/victims...

Sean Connery in OUTLAND

Only a few years away from directing 2010, it's no coincidence that Hyam's was not only visually inspired by Stanley Kubrick's 2001 space-travel-being-second-nature theme, but the meticulously brooding, melancholy pace that Ridley Scott also brought into ALIEN...

But by the inevitable HIGH NOON-style showdown-finale against random hired-gun antagonists, OUTLAND is forced to awkwardly adhere to the realistic slowness of outer-space/spacesuit movements: so this futuristic Western's best served in the tense thriller/mystery-genre anticipation.