Outland

1. Some films possess greatness. Outland does not. It will never be remastered and re-released to the cinema; there will never be a Criterion Collection DVD boxed set; and, should NASA choose to launch a third Voyager space probe, they will not include a copy of the DVD to illustrate human culture.
Nonetheless, Outland has three claims to fame.

Claim One: It stars Sean Connery, back when Sean Connery actually starred in films. Ever since Highlander he's been a supporting player, albeit an extremely popular one - his last proper leading role was in Medicine Man in 1992.
Even when the film isn't very good, Connery is interesting to watch. In this respect he's a bit like Michael Caine, although Connery's agent is more discerning. Whilst Caine has The Swarm, Jaws IV and The Holcrot Covenant under his belt, Connery's closest brush with awfulness was Meteor, which wasn't so much bad as just dull. Outland was Connery's next film, and although he still had Sword of the Valiant to look forward to, his career picked up afterwards.
He still appears in his fair share of dross (The Avengers, for example), but he will remain massively famous and rich until he dies, which is more than can be said of, say, Patrick Swayze.

Claim Two: Outland has exploding people. A little bit of graphic gore can do wonders for a film's box-office potential, even more so in the early-80s. Scanners, Alien and Eraserhead brought David Cronenberg, Ridley Scott and David Lynch to the attention of mainstream audiences, and that's without mentioning people who became famous for gore alone - Herschell Gordon Lewis, George A Romero, Tode Hooper, Dario Argento et al.
As a film's raison d'être, graphic nastiness fell out of favour as the 80s wore on - John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing provoked and early backlash, whilst the Friday the Thirteenth and Nightmare on Elm Street films became progressively less bloody and more MTV-friendly with each episode. Ultra-violence took over as a fad in the late-80s, with mainstream action pictures such as Robocop and Predator, but by the end of the 90s a conservative cinematic climate meant that violence was usually restricted to art films.
Natural Born Killers, Hannibal and Saving Private Ryan had varying pretensions to being high art, whereas the various Tarantino clones could hide behind a post-modern, ironic, mock-film noir cloak. You're supposed to laugh at the killings in Very Bad Things, for example, although they aren't very funny.
This ironic approach comes about because film-makers don't have the courage to say something heartfelt. Either that, or they don't have anything to say.

Claim Three: Outland looks a bit like Alien. The visual evocation of a grimy mining colony is extremely effective, and so much effort is put into the sets that the film seems almost like an episode of a long-running, expensive television series in which the environment is the co-star. Rather like Space: 1999, in fact, in that the sets and effects are much more interesting than the things happening in front of them.

3. Outland is essentially High Noon but set on a moon of Jupiter. Or rather, the second half of the film is essentially High Noon. The first half is a detective thriller which sets up the second half.
High Noon was released in 1952 and starred Gary Cooper. It was a modestly-budgeted, small-scale Western that took place in real time and had a socialist message that probably doesn't go down too well nowadays on the internet. Like Casablanca, Bad Day at Black Rock and The Terminator, it has become a classic partially because of its utilisation of limited resources, and partially because it is a good film.
Outland is as small-scale as High Noon - nobody involved was under the impression that they were making a classic - but seems to have a respectable budget. It does not take place in real time, and it doesn't have much of a message, either. In High Noon our Sheriff hero found himself in danger, and was shunned by his townsfolk. In Outland, our hero finds himself in a more complex predicament, and is shunned by his corrupt deputies. In high Noon the message is that, as civilians, we can't just mind our own businesses and hope that things will be okay for other people, whereas in Outland the message is that, if you're a policeman, you shouldn't be corrupt.
In general, Outland suffers from being set in a much larger playground. The mining colony appears to be so vast that our hero could hide from his would-be assassins for weeks.

1. I first saw Outland on a small black and white television at about half-past-twelve at night. It's one of those films that gets shown quite late, as a filler. In this respect it's similar to Sean Connery's other sci-fi effort, Zardoz. The similarities end there. I don't think Zardoz is out on DVD yet.

1. Outland hasn't dated all that badly. The mining colony is purely functional, the music is orchestral (more of that in a moment), the actors are fairly anonymous and there aren't any outlandish fashions. Technically, the computer displays and captions are dated, although it's interesting to note that, even today, computer displays in films tend to have green text on a black background.
There isn't a great deal of modelwork - the mining colony itself is hidden in darkness, and the shuttle that delivers the assassins is shown mostly as a flashing light and some engine wash.
One thing that does date it, however, is that the cast are all over thirty years old, in some cases over forty. That would never happen nowadays.

1. The music for Outland is by Jerry Goldsmith, an insanely-prolific composer whose previous two scores were for Alien and Star Trek: The Motion Picture. He became famous for his atonal, avant-garde score for Planet of the Apes, and won an Oscar for The Omen. He has been nominated for 'Best Score' fifteen times, and is presumably quite relaxed about the whole thing.
A decent orchestral score can make a film seem classy. Robocop, for example, would have been less effective if the music had been mid-80s synth rock. This is probably because it costs a lot of money to hire an orchestra, and I should imagine that a bad producer would be unable to see the point in spending money on stuff that, in his opinion, does not matter.
But it does matter. Think of every single American television movie ever. Even the modern ones have the same kind of rubbish mid-80s synth rock. Either the producers just don't care about the music, or there's one composer who has a monopoly on American television movies, and he's useless at making music.

5. Steven Berkoff is in it. I had forgotten that. He gets killed in the chest with a shotgun.
Outland came before his his short-lived excursion into mainstream cinema, during which he appeared as villains in the James Bond film Octopussy and Beverly Hills Cop. The latter is one of the key films of the 80s, updating the Thin Man-esqe comedy / thriller genre for the modern age. Rush Hour was essentially Beverly Hills Cop without the swearing. Yet it isn't out on DVD.

3. Peter Hyams, the director, is a jazz drummer and painter when he is not being a director. He's directed lots of films which, like Outland, will never be classics, but which are fairly well-known and watchable. 2010 and Capricorn One were the high spots, and tend to suggest that he's very good at creating a setting, but not quite as good at giving his characters something interesting to do. He often writes and photographs his films, but he will never have an airport named after him and there will never be a boxed set of Peter Hyam's films.
In recent years he's moved from 'action thrillers' to pure action films, with Timecop, Sudden Death, and his most recent major effort, End of Days. Of those, Sudden Death was a decent Die Hard clone, Timecop was, along with Universal Soldier, a failed attempt to turn Jean Claude Van Damme into a mainstream Hollywood star, and End of Days was a distressingly poor waste of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

3. The film is set on Io, the most famous of Jupiter's moons, and the one most likely to have a mining colony on it. Uniquely of all the moons in the solar system, it displays evidence of volcanism, and thus elements buried in the moon's crust are regularly churned up to the surface where they can be mined.
Io is an almost literally hellish environment - the surface is covered with sulphur, and the moon is a nasty patchwork of dirty yellows and browns. Scientists theorise that Io's proximity to Jupiter's massive gravity means that the moon is constantly being 'kneaded', which causes the volcanic activity.
I know all this from Arthur C. Clarke's 2010, which is set amongst Jupiter's moons, and presumably Peter Hyams knew all this from NASA's 1974 Pioneer 10 and 1979 Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 flybys.
Let's give a round of applause to Voyager 2. It went off to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and is now heading off into interstellar space, still sending back faint signals. I know it's just a car-sized piece of scientific equipment, but I feel sorry for the poor thing, spinning off into infinity. Mind you, if the Sun blows up, it'll be the only thing left.

3. The sets. Halfway through there's a chase sequence. Impressively, it's done with a series of what appear to be continuous Steadicam shots, one of which starts in a dormitory area before moving through a couple of tunnels. I don't know if Hyams 'cheated' by redressing an existing location (such as the abandoned steelworks that stand in for spaceships in a million and one DTV sci-fi films), but it's very impressive nonetheless.
The chase ends with the villain trying to force Sean Connery's head into a deep-fat-fryer filled with chips, which is a nice touch - in the future, people will still need potatoes. They keep well, they don't take up much space, they're cheap, and they're versatile. With potatoes you can make chips, crisps, and, er, mashed potatoes. You can roast them. You can boil them. You can fry them. You can ferment them and make vodka. You can use them as projectiles. You can add eyes and legs and use them as toys. You can talk to them, smash them in your hands, stab them over and over and over, break them into pieces and stamp on them to relieve stress. All kinds of things.

3. The blurb on the back of the box is quite heroic - it manages to hype up a middling film without seeming silly. Nonetheless, it uses the word 'spellbinding', not a word I would associate with Outland. The Princess Bride, yes, but not Outland. Still, kudos to the copywriter. Millions of people around the world read your work without ever caring about it or knowing who you are. I should imagine that most people don't even stop to think that it was written by a person, they probably think it just appeared there spontaneously.

3. Well, what else is there to say about Outland? It came out shortly after Saturn 3, a similarly average sci-fi flick, although it's less interesting in that Saturn 3 was written by Martin Amis, and had Harvey Keitel in an early role, and a cool robot. There aren't any cool robots in Outland and it wasn't written by the author of London Fields and it doesn't star an actor who went on to become famous for playing morally-dubious characters. I don't think that Sean Connery has ever played a villain. Unless you count The Avengers, in which he played a villain. So I'm wrong.

I'm writing this whilst listening to Sigue Sigue Sputnik's Flaunt It. At this very moment I'm halfway through 'Sex Bomb Boogie'. Most of the songs have three chords and bags of attitude. This sounds great in theory. Lots of things sound great in theory. Surviving an aeroplane crash by jumping into the air at the exact moment of impact sounds great in theory. So does kidnapping a woman and making her a sex-slave. Or performing cunnilingus. Or being a sniper. The reality is never quite as good as the fantasy. There's always a mundane detail that brings everything crashing down.

Besides which, I always thought that the 'three chords and lots of attitude' ethic was purely a starting-point. I think the original quote was something like "here's a chord, here's another, here's a third - now form a band". I don't think there was any rule about sticking to three chords.

Mind you, you can do a lot with three chords. Anarchy in the UK had three chords, I think. I'm not a trained musician so I'm not sure. The 'I am an antichrist' bit has once chord, although there seem to be a couple of quick ones just after 'antichrist'. The 'And aaaaaaaah want to' bit has a second, whilst the 'beeeee, anarchy' bit has the third. Pretty Vacant is similar.

Whigfield's Saturday Night has two chords, I think. So does Frankie Goes to Hollywood's Relax. I think that Sigue Sigue Sputnik wanted to be a bit like Frankie Goes to Hollywood, but they didn't have Trevor Horn to tell them what to do.