There is no "out there" in OUTLAND

Hello, my name is Junius. And I am a man with a high tolerance for stillness. In fact, I relish the quiet moments. Because in the quiet moments, you often find gateways opening to the "whys" of existence, that give you revelatory peeks at all that which lies underneath, around the corner, on the other side. Often, some of the best artwork does just this. It appears placid on the surface, but underneath, it is swimming with a swarm of meaning and enlightenment for those who are open, who are ready. Plenty of films that many think of as "slow" and "boring" are in actuality such films. They offer much, but they require you to go deep, rather than titillate you with surface thrills that are gone as soon as the scene has ended, if not soner.

And then, there are films that are genuinely, stultifyingly, utterly boring. Dull. Their underneath is just as listless, just as lifeless as their surface. Sleepwalking actors, dead metaphors, people doing it by the numbers, punching a clock and not much else. Surface dwelling people would just go to sleep or start texting. Deep people ask "why am I here?", and not in the metaphorical, spiritual or existential sense. They are wondering why they are wasting their time watching this drivel.

Which brings us to Outland. Basically, High Noon in space. Honest lawman comes to frontier town being menaced by criminal element. Lawman takes stand. Thugs come to take him out. Except it's in outer space. The town is Con-Am 27. The lawman is played by Sean Connery. The man representing the local corrupt power is played by Peter Boyle. The setting is the Jovian area of our solar system (Jupiter and it's moons, specifically, Io, one of the more interesting Jovian moons. But not even Io can liven up this dead movie.). How do you destroy a science fiction remake of High Noon? Easy when it's director AND scriptwriter Peter Hyams.

The film world is filled with a series of hack directors with a certain visual and technical verve, who make films that look good, but have no soul, no heart. You don't feel it. Hyams was one of the first of this breed. And make no mistake, Outland, visually, is a beautiful movie. It's old school model work that still holds up. It's settings feel real, feel physical. The bleak, spartan, decadent mining colony is a visual feast and totally believable. Technically, it is convincing as a science fiction film that isn't very far removed from where we are now. Except for the idea of people popping like balloons when exposed to a vacuum, there is very little to stretch credibility. And that's the whole virtue of the film. That's all. There is no sense of any of this mattering in any way. We have great actors who do their best with what they have, and they do well. But it does not emotionally engage. There is no real sense of this being a window into real lives, a real world. It is just a procession of high tech shadow puppets with their strings being pulled by very bored puppeteers. Beautiful puppets, but puppets all the same.

Outland, you did something very few do. You bored me.