Synopsis: In a
mining colony on Io, one of the moons of Jupiter, a worker suddenly screams that he is
covered in spiders. In his panic, he severs his own airline. The sudden drop in pressure
reduces him to a bloody pulp. His body plunges into the depths of the mining
operation…. The colony's new Federal District Marshall, William O’Niel (Sean
Connery), checks the overnight security tapes. His subordinate, Security Sergeant Montone
(James B. Sikking), reports that it is not possible to do an autopsy on the dead man, but
assures O’Niel that there is no chance of the death being homicide, adding that such
"incidents" occur from time to time. Montone also mentions that Transportation
got the tickets that Mrs O’Niel requested. O’Niel asks his wife, Carol (Kika
Markham), about this, but she is evasive. O’Niel attends an uncomfortable meeting
with the colony’s administrators and his own deputies, in which it is made clear to
him by Sheppard (Peter Boyle), the colony’s General Manager, that his main duty is
not to rock the boat. Afterwards, Montone warns O’Niel not to get in Sheppard’s
way. At the airlock, a group of miners look on in horror as one of their number steps into
a no-pressure elevator without a suit. They try frantically to save him, but he sets the
elevator in motion. It undergoes decompression – and so does he…. O’Niel
returns to his quarters to find that Carol has taken their young son and left him. In a
recorded farewell, she explains that although she loves him, she cannot stand another
posting such as this one, for herself or the boy. O’Niel meets with his deputies,
becoming angry at their casual reaction to the recent deaths. He visits the colony’s
doctor, Marion Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), demanding a full report on all such
"incidents" that have occurred in the past six months. In the rest area, a
worker, Sagan (Steven Berkoff), locks himself into a cubicle and injects himself with a
red substance…. O’Niel replays Carol’s farewell message. He is interrupted
by a call from Montone, who tells him that Sagan has gone berserk, and is threatening to
kill a prostitute. O’Niel orders a technician to unlock Sagan's door, at the same
time trying to soothe the deranged man. Meanwhile, Montone enters a ventilation duct and
approaches the room from behind. The door is opened, but just as O’Niel is about to
enter, Montone kills Sagan with a shotgun blast. As Dr Lazarus treats the injured
prostitute, she gives O’Niel the report he demanded, telling him that there were
twenty-eight "incidents" in the preceding six months, and twenty-four in the six
months before that – but only two in the period prior to that. She further tells him
that it is Company policy to load bodies onto the colony’s shuttle, and jettison them
into space. O’Niel goes looking for Sagan’s body, which he finds packed in the
shuttle’s cargo hold. He takes a blood sample from it, which he gives to Lazarus for
analysis. Although she warns him that she knows little of such work, Lazarus manages to
identify a foreign substance in Sagan’s blood. It is polydichloric euthynol, an
amphetamine that in the short term makes human beings capable of doing fourteen
hours’ work in six hours – and that in the long term induces psychosis….
Comments: Do not forsake me, oh my
darlin’, on this, our weddin’ day…. Oh. Sorry. Got carried away
there for a moment. Which tends to happen when bad films insist upon reminding you of good
films…. Well, actually, I’m not sure if Outland is strictly an
out-and-out bad film – but it is a very silly and disappointing one. Rather
than hardcore science fiction, Outland is a thriller set in space (and in "the
future", although a date is never specified). That said, it’s not much of a
thriller. For most of the film’s running time, writer-director Peter Hyams makes
little attempt to build suspense. Rather, the story plays itself out in a puzzlingly
matter-of-fact manner. The audience knows early on that drug addiction is causing the
spate of deaths on Io. Given that Sheppard, the General Manager, has already bragged
loudly about how much productivity has increased since he took over, it isn’t too
difficult to figure out who’s supplying the drugs in question. Similarly, when
O’Niel starts investigating, everything drops into place with a minimum of fuss. He
checks on the criminal records of the colony’s employees, and yup, two of them have a
history of drug offences, and yup again, they’re working for Sheppard. Not exactly a
difficult investigation. (Wouldn’t it have made more sense for Sheppard to employ
people with criminal tendencies, but no record?) The other major problem in the screenplay
is the underdeveloped nature of O’Niel, our supposed hero. Ambiguity and shading in a
character are fine, but what we have here is downright confusion. In essence, O’Niel
is familiar enough: an apparent failure trying to seize one last chance at professional
and personal redemption. However, we are given little information about the nature of
O’Niel’s failure, and the little we do get is frankly contradictory. We know
that he has had "one lousy posting after another", that the Company sends him
"from toilet to toilet", that they think he "belongs here". On this
point, O’Niel himself is unsure. He takes his stand against Sheppard and his goons
primarily to find out for himself whether the Company is right about him. What we
don’t know – and never do find out – is how all this came to be. All we
ever glean of O’Niel’s background comes from a remark of Sheppard’s –
"I read your record – you got a big mouth!" – which would tend to
infer that far from being a spineless Company factotum, as is implied for most of the
film, O’Niel has fallen out of favour by bucking his superiors. This lack of insight
into O’Niel’s character has serious repercussions upon the film as a whole. We
don’t understand why he does what he does, and are therefore forced to take his
conduct at face value – not a good thing when, to be quite blunt, most of that
conduct is headshakingly dumb.
There are two great unanswered questions in Outland.
The first is why, with all the evidence he has collected, O’Niel simply doesn’t arrest
Sheppard? Sure, it might not have worked; the people in Sheppard’s employ might have
intervened, and violently; but then again, rather than risk their own necks, they might
not. In any case, O’Niel does nothing of the sort, leaving us with the second
question: even if we accept that there is some reason why O’Niel can’t or
won’t arrest Sheppard, why does he not inform someone outside of the mining colony of
what’s going on? Far from doing so, he doesn’t even gesture vaguely in that
direction - not when he first figures out the reason for the string of gruesome deaths,
nor when he obtains concrete evidence of his suspicion, nor when his deputy and his
prisoner are both gruesomely murdered, nor even when he discovers that he himself is in
imminent danger of his life! O’Niel’s manner of conducting his investigation
makes even less sense. At one moment, he’s plunging his hand into a deep fryer in
order to retrieve a package of drugs, and thus prove his case; the next moment, instead of
hiding the cache of drugs that he’s managed to intercept, he’s flushing it down
the toilet! (Or at least, so he says; we could give him the benefit of the doubt
and assume he’s lying, but we’re given no reason to do so). Later on,
O’Niel puts a tap on Sheppard’s communications, and by this method learns of the
fate in store for himself; but having obtained this recorded evidence, does he do anything
with it? Send it to his superiors? To the administration of the Company? To a news agency
on Earth? To anyone? He does not. Then we have his interaction with Sheppard.
O’Niel’s reaction to his discovery of the reason for the deaths on Io is most
peculiar. Instead of being outraged at Sheppard’s conduct in a general sense, he
seems to take it personally; as if Sheppard did all of it just to get at him. Each
time he makes a discovery, O’Niel goes straight to Sheppard, taunting him with his
knowledge and with the kink his actions have put in Sheppard’s plans (behaviour that
is directly responsible for two more murders being carried out, a fact simply glossed
over). Through all of this, the viewer keeps waiting for an explanation; or rather, a revelation:
that O’Niel and Sheppard have some kind of history, that they used to be partners,
that one of them sold the other out…. But no, nothing. Ultimately, these scenes play
out as if O’Niel is trying to goad Sheppard into coming after him – which on one
level is a possible explanation. Late in the film, just before the climax, O’Niel
speaks bitterly of his life to Dr Lazarus ("They sent me to this pile of shit because
they think I belong here"), and of his desperate personal need to discover for
himself whether or not his superiors were right about him. In light of this, it is
possible to read O’Niel’s behaviour as resulting from a deep-seated need to
confront his enemies alone – to stand or fall on his own efforts. But why, then, does
O’Niel appeal for help (futilely) to both his deputies and the colony’s other
employees? And why, when help finally does offer itself, does he positively leap at it? It
just doesn’t make sense….
Mind you, Sheppard’s own behaviour is no
more explicable. The backstory of this film, as far as we can interpret it, is that
Sheppard, with the collusion of someone connected with the Company, is shipping
amphetamines to Io, which are distributed to the workers with the help of two criminal
associates. (Actually, the biggest surprise in Outland is that the Company isn’t
distributing these drugs to its workers as a matter of course.) When Sheppard learns that
O’Niel has intercepted and destroyed an entire shipment of drugs, he decides that the
Marshall has to go. However, when Sheppard tells his supplier who it is that is to be
killed, the reaction is a startled, "Holy shit!" and a stern warning that if
anything goes wrong, Sheppard himself will be the next one eliminated. From this we can
infer that despite appearances to the contrary, the killing of a Federal Marshall will
have repercussions with the Company (which makes O’Niel’s conduct still more
puzzling). Given this, you’d think that Sheppard would want to take O’Niel out
as quietly as possible – and really, it’s very hard to think that considering
the convoluted structure of the colony, and its myriad dark corners, Sheppard would have
all that much difficulty arranging an "accident"; particularly when, as we
learn, he has members of O’Niel’s own team in his pay. But instead of this,
Sheppard sends for a pair of hitmen! – and announces to everyone in the
colony that they’re coming! How exactly he means to get away with all of this, when
nearly two thousand people know what he’s up to (he might be right about them
not interfering at the time, but does he honestly think they’ll all keep their mouths
shut when their tours are over?), is left to the viewer’s imagination…. By the
way, if the plot of Outland is beginning to sound somewhat familiar,
there’s a reason. The final third of the film, as has been well documented, is a
fairly straightforward re-working of the plot of High Noon – only without any
of that film’s depth, tension or moral complexity. High Noon, for those of you
who don’t know (and if you don’t – shame on you!!), concerns a
sheriff, well-liked and respected within his community, who learns on his wedding day that
outlaws whom he once succeeded in jailing are out – and gunning for him. The sheriff
turns for help to the community which he has protected – only to have his
"friends" rat on him, one by one; while his new wife, a Quaker, threatens to
leave him if he does not keep his promise to her, and give up his job and the violence it
entails. Written by the soon-to-be blacklisted Carl Foreman, High Noon is a taut
and caustic examination of the grey areas between love and duty, heroism and cowardice;
and of the yawning chasm that can sometimes lurk between principles in theory and
principles in practice. In transferring this story into his own screenplay, Peter Hyams
seems to have missed the entire point of the original film. Here, the moral dimension is
completely lacking. There’s no reason in the world why O’Niel should expect
anyone to come to his assistance (well – maybe one reason; we’ll get into
that in a minute). All he has to hope for is that the Company has misjudged the character
of someone else in the colony as well as himself – which, as it turns out, they did.
Except that by this stage of the film, we pretty much know that already, so where’s
the surprise?
And in fact, the plot of Outland seems
to me to be too cynical for its own good. What are we to make of its assumption that no-one
in the colony will lift a finger to help O’Niel? The implication is that the size of
the bonuses they are receiving is enough to keep their mouths shut. (The bonuses are so
big, by the way, because of all the extra productivity from the drug-addicted workers.)
Yet surely, there must be someone there for whom this simply isn’t good enough?
It’s a fair enough inference, perhaps, that individual failures like O’Niel and
Lazarus end up taking positions in mining colonies because no-one else wants the job
– and because no-one else will have them – but why should all the other workers
be tagged as morally lacking, purely on the basis of the work they do? We can understand
that the workers are not, perhaps, the cream of the human race; that they have agreed to
do hard, dirty work under near-impossible physical conditions in order to get rich quick;
but why should that mean that they have no morals at all? (You could argue this the other
way, of course: it’s easy enough to picture some of the miners ganging up to fight
the hired killers out of pure contrariness.) It is significant that when O’Niel makes
his appeal for help, he makes it to the administrative personnel, not to the miners
themselves. What he should have done was assemble the workers and let them know
exactly what’s going on: that Sheppard is feeding them drugs in order to line his own
pockets, and that in doing so, he has caused the bloody, violent deaths of dozens of their
fellows. Want to bet that O’Niel wouldn’t have found himself with plenty of
assistance then? But of course, if O’Niel had done that, we wouldn’t have
had the film’s climactic showdown – which is primarily why the film was made,
after all.
For some time, Outland continues to
mimic its model. The arrival of the shuttle on which the killers are travelling is counted
down by a huge digital clock, which we are given meaningful close-ups of at regular
intervals. We also have O’Niel’s appeals to his co-workers, which have the
result you’d expect. Once the killers arrive, however, Peter Hyams seems to remember
this is supposed to be a science fiction film; and consequently, the setting of Outland
begins to dominate the action. Both the film’s climactic scenes and an earlier one,
in which O’Niel pursues one of Sheppard’s underlings through the metal rabbit
warren of the colony’s living quarters, seem structured principally to show off the
film’s sets. This is not a bad thing. The production design of Outland is one
of its main virtues. This was one of the first films to extrapolate from Alien’s
grungy, lived-in, industrial look; and the mining colony on Io is a huge, grim, ugly
wasteland of scaffolding and dark corridors and claustrophobic spaces. (And since this is
a Peter Hyams film, yes, we do spend quite a lot of time wandering around in the
dark. Fortunately, however, in this case Hyams did not act as his own
cinematographer, so occasionally – just occasionally - someone turns a light
on….) On the downside, Outland suffers from something that has since become
endemic in science fiction films: logic and character are continually sacrificed to images
and actions that "look cool". In the end, although they struggle valiantly, the
film’s cast simply cannot overcome the gaping holes in the screenplay. Peter Boyle is
a bit of a disappointment as Sheppard, being far too generically "evil" to
really convince. (He and Sean Connery also deliver one of the most ludicrously
anticlimactic "showdowns" between Good Guy and Bad Guy ever committed to film.)
Much better is the performance of James B. Sikking as Montone, O’Niel’s morally
ambiguous subordinate, who "doesn’t do anything wrong", just
"doesn’t do anything right". As for Sean Connery himself, you get the
feeling that he was cast purely as an actor who can carry a doubtful screenplay; that the
audience is supposed to go along with what he does without thinking about it too much.
(Sorry, Sean!) Connery does what he can as O’Niel (or is that O’Neil? –
check out the way his nametag switches from scene to scene!), but he’s simply not
given sufficient material to work with. However, the highlight of Outland is
unquestionably the performance of Frances Sternhagen as Marion Lazarus, a self-proclaimed
"wreck" of a doctor employed to "dispense tranquilisers" and to
"certify that the Company prostitutes are free of syphilis", but who begins to
regain her self-respect – and her courage – through her association with
O’Niel. Of course, it helps that Sternhagen is given all of the screenplay’s
best lines (one of which may well make an appearance as my e-mail signature in the coming
week), such as when, witnessing O’Niel’s angry, frustrated behaviour upon the
racquet ball court, she sums up his situation and the film as a whole with the dry
observation, "That’s pretty good – playing yourself and losing…."
Although Sternhagen’s acerbic performance is very welcome on its own account, so is
what it represents. Sternhagen – a not overly attractive, un-made-up, middle-aged
woman - is the kind of thoroughly believable character actress that just doesn’t seem
to have a place in Hollywood any more. And this is true, in fact, of Outland’s
entire cast. With the exception of the O’Niels’ noxious kid (who gets thankfully
little screentime), there’s barely a character in this film under the age of thirty.
What we have here is a group of hard-living, hard-working, experienced adults
– and more power to Peter Hyams and his team for taking this direction. Also
praiseworthy is that the film makes no effort at all to graft on some kind of
"romance" between O’Niel and Lazarus – although the latter does
observe at one point, "Your wife is one crazy lady." (From the little we see of
her, it’s hard to feel that O’Niel has suffered any great loss through being
"forsaken". Let’s put it this way: Carol O’Niel is no Grace Kelly.)
All of this makes for a very welcome scenario, and one that these days, you can’t
even begin to imagine making it past the discussion phase of a film’s production.
But of course, neither the faults nor the
virtues of Outland discussed so far are really why we’re here – or
rather, really why I’m here. The most memorable thing about this film
isn’t its cast, or its acting, or its screenplay, or even its production design, but
rather the fact that it boasts, if that’s the right word, the most extreme example of
jes’ plain wrong cinematic science I’ve guffawed at in some considerable
time.
Where to start, where to start?
Well, perhaps with the most forgivable of the
film’s errors: its setting. In 1979, the Voyager spacecraft transmitted images of Io
that indicated that the moon was the most volcanically active body in the entire solar
system. Given the timing of these discoveries, it is hard not to think that Peter Hyams
was influenced by contemporary news reports in deciding upon a setting for his
space-western. Unfortunately for the director, later space exploration, chiefly the
Galileo missions of the late nineties, proved that Io is not merely volcanically active,
but volcanically violent, the result of being caught in the middle of an unending
cosmic tug-of-war between Europa and Ganymede, two more of Jupiter’s moons, and
Jupiter itself; some of Io’s volcanic plumes have reached as far as 300 km into
space. And on top of this, there are Io’s unendurable temperatures (an average of
–143oC, with the occasional "warm" spot near its volcanoes), and
the fact that it lies within a belt of intense radiation. So I don’t think, somehow,
that we’ll be seeing any Outland-ish mining colonies on Io any time
soon….or even late. Still, I can’t imagine that these discoveries bothered Peter
Hyams all that much. Far from being selected as a setting because of its probability, it
is easier to envision Io being selected for the sheer visual impact of having Jupiter as a
backdrop to the action. I might have criticised this film for being too willing to go
along with things simply because they "look cool", but there’s no denying
that the outside shots of the colony, with Jupiter hanging massively overhead, are quite
stunningly rendered – even though these images were sadly compromised on my pan &
scan print. (Shoulda rented the DVD. Dang….)
The film’s other blunders range from the
unavoidable to the simply silly to the genuinely maddening. Time has not been kind to Outland.
The film’s plot, such as it is, relies heavily upon the surveillance and electronic
communication systems at O’Niel’s disposal – systems that, these days, look
so woefully primitive that it’s hard not to laugh. Less forgivably, we have the
"injury" that O’Niel suffers when he pursues a packet of drugs into a deep
fryer. He wears a token bandage on the hand during the next scene or two (yeah, you’d
think), but after that it simply disappears – allowing us to see that there’s
not a mark on him. The company-issued space helmets are rather interestingly designed,
too: they all have a row of small lights lining the inside of the face-plate!
Pretty, but hardly practical. (Don’t get what I mean? Try this trick: when
you’re driving one night, turn your headlights off, and your internal lights
on…. Now you’ve got it!) And then we have the film’s attitude to
blood. The scenes leading up to Dr Lazarus’s identification of the polydichloric
euthynol are a double whammy of stupidity. First of all, in a purely practical sense, we
have to accept that the Company would go to all the trouble of transporting the bodies of
its dead workers (whatever the cause of death) into space in order to dispose of them. Why
would they bother? Wouldn’t cremation be more sensible? But even if we do
accept this – why in the world would Sheppard leave Sagan’s body (which is full
of the drug he’s trying to conceal) lying around in the shuttle’s cargo hold?
This is dumb enough, but what follows is even worse. O’Niel finds Sagan’s body
without too much trouble – and takes a blood sample from it! In the first
place, there is no way that you could possibly get a liquid blood sample from a body that
had been dead that long; and in the second place, O’Niel takes the sample from
Sagan’s throat – which would of course have been empty of blood by that time
anyway, due to the effects of lividity. (And in the third place – what the
heck did they use for "blood" in this scene? Watered down raspberry cordial?
Yeesh!) Not content with this, Outland gives us one more intensely stupid moment
when the drug pusher captured by O’Niel is murdered in his prison cell. Actually,
these "cells" are one of the film’s better ideas: zero gravity chambers in
which the prisoners simply float (and, presumably, think about what they’ve done).
O’Niel comes in to question his prisoner, only to find that someone’s been there
before him: that the man is a bloody mess, that his airline has been severed – and
that the blood oozing from the tube is – dripping UP.
Uh – negative gravity!? Oh, well.
It looks cool, so what the heck?
Another major idiocy comes in the behaviour
of the hitmen hired by Sheppard. Putting aside the question of whether the pump-action
shotgun will really be the weapon of choice – of the FUTURE – you really
do have to wonder how the guys we see here got to be "the best" in their
profession, as Sheppard is assured they are. Even if we're willing to overlook the
irritating movie convention that insists that Bad Guys cannot hit Good Guys, no matter how
much heavy artillery they’re carrying, or how many clear shots they have, how is one
supposed to react to a professional killer, used to working in space, who allows himself
to be suckered into firing at a shadowy "movement" which he mistakes for his
victim, and who thus shoots out the windows of the room he’s in and gets fatally
sucked out into a vacuum? Well – perhaps the same way that we’re supposed to
react to the discovery that in space stations – of the FUTURE – the
windows will be made of ordinary glass….
And then there’s the big one.
If Outland is known for anything these
days, it’s probably for the gruesome scenes of explosive decompression that occur
towards the beginning of the film. The two workers who go berserk, and expose themselves
to zero pressure, swell up like rotten pumpkins, then redecorate their surroundings with
their inner workings. (This is presumably how O’Niel’s prisoner dies, too, but
we only see the aftermath.) Just one problem – it is generally accepted, and has been
for some time, that exposure of the human body to zero pressure would have no such effect.
First of all – and I really do hate to break this to everybody – the
"explosive" part of "explosive decompression" refers to the rate of
change of pressure (and possibly the accompanying noise), not to its effects on the
body. The gases in your body would certainly expand under zero pressure, and the fluids
would probably vapourise, but this would not necessarily be fatal. The single most
important thing is NOT to hold your breath: the expansion of the gas in your lungs would
certainly cause them to rupture. Otherwise, the biggest and most immediate threat is loss
of oxygen to the brain. It is estimated that if decompressed, you would have approximately
fifteen useful seconds to help yourself. After that, you would certainly lose
consciousness – and if not recompressed within about ninety seconds, you would die; not
by exploding, but because of pulmonary-respiratory failure; or, more likely still, plain
old asphyxia.
Those of you who know your science fiction
films might be saying to yourselves, "Ah, so 2001 was right!" Yes, it was
– because most of what I've told you was known before that film was made. Or to put
it another way, about fifteen years before Outland was made…. And much
as it pains me to say anything nice about Event Horizon, they were reasonably
accurate there, too. But Outland got it entirely wrong – and then didn’t
even have the grace to be consistent. During the film’s final scenes, O’Niel
fights for his life outside the colony. As he and his adversary, both wearing pressure
suits, struggle desperately, you can see quite clearly that O’Niel’s sleeve is
pulled out of his glove, exposing his arm to the atmosphere. Given what we’ve seen so
far, this should have been enough to send O’Niel into his imitation of an
overripe tomato – but instead, so intent were the film-makers upon playing the
Hero’s Death Battle Exemption© card, they got it more or less right by
accident: nothing happens. This pretty much sums up Outland: sloppily
written, still more sloppily executed, and in the end, just plain infuriating.
But, hey! – it looks cool, right?
|
Director: Peter
Hyams