Column Science Fiction Film Club Outland: Bringing the Wild West to Outer Space Sean Connery stars in a sci fi version of “High Noon”… By Kali Wallace | Published on January 21, 2026 Credit: Warner Bros. Comment 0 Share New Share Credit: Warner Bros. Outland (1981). Written and directed by Peter Hyams. Starring Sean Connery, Peter Boyle, Frances Sternhagen, and James B. Sikking. It’s one of the most iconic scenes in cinema: a man in a black hat, with a marshal’s star pinned on his vest, steps into the road in an Old West town. The camera draws back as he looks around. The street is completely empty. The townspeople are all fled or hidden away, and the marshal is alone as he walks purposefully down the road. The movie is Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon (1952). Gary Cooper is Marshal Will Kane, and he’s alone because the people of Hadleyville have left him without backup to meet the arrival of the dangerous outlaw Frank Miller on the noon train. The movie up to that point has dealt with Kane trying and failing to find help for the inevitable confrontation. Some of the townspeople resent Kane for cleaning up their town during his time as marshal. Most of them are simply too scared. So Kane goes to face the outlaw alone. I wrote a bit about the political context of High Noon in the article about Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956), and I’ll once again share this detailed Vanity Fair piece on the same topic, because it’s a fascinating bit of cinema history. I won’t get into it all again, because it’s not really relevant here, but it’s worth remembering because High Noon is a beloved, influential, and powerful film, and it’s important to know a bit about it before we get into Peter Hyams’ Outland, which is, quite literally, High Noon in space. First, however, a fun and distracting side quest: digging into how scholars and critics define “Western” as a genre and what role Westerns played in film history. There is a lot of variability, but generally speaking it refers to stories set in so-called “American frontier” locations, which mostly means west of the Mississippi, and taking place in the second half of the 19th century, starting with the 1849 California gold rush and ending with the “closing” of the frontier in 1890, when the U.S. Census Bureau announced there was no more land without white settlers. Westerns used to absolutely dominate American cinema in a way that is difficult to comprehend, because no other genre occupies that same space now. There are varying estimates, but some numbers I’ve seen are that 25% of movies made between 1940 and 1950 were Westerns, and about 40% of all movies made prior to 1960 were Westerns. Any way you look at it, that’s a lot of movies, and it covers everything from The Great Train Robbery (1903) to an abundance of films in the silent era to the mid-century resurgence that lasted through the waning years of the studio era to the shift toward international production with the spaghetti Westerns of the ’60s and ’70s. Trends in media are rarely demarcated very clearly, but a lot of film historians point to George Roy Hill’s Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) as a thematically fitting last hurrah for the Western film. Of course, the Western never really went anywhere. There are still Western films and shows. Even though I was a teenager who didn’t much care at the time, I remember people proclaiming the return of the Western with the release of Dances With Wolves (1990), Unforgiven (1992), and Tombstone (1993), and every couple of years since then there is a new movie or television show that fills that same niche all over again. In another way, it might be accurate to say that Westerns did go somewhere. In fact, Western fiction has been going somewhere besides the American West for a long time, since well before a funky little TV show pitched as “Wagon Train to the stars” premiered in September of 1966 with the opening words, “Space: the final frontier…” Science fiction and Westerns have been strange genre bedfellows for a very long time. John Carter, the main character of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom stories, is a Confederate soldier who went west to find gold before being mysteriously transported to Mars. Prolific pulp sci fi writer C.L. Moore wrote a bunch of stories in which her gunslinging outlaw protagonist, Northwest Smith, travels around the solar system as a smuggler. Early sci fi comics like Buck Rogers embraced space as a setting for exploration and adventure. Some sci fi magazines didn’t like the association; on the back cover of its first issue in 1950, Galaxy Science Fiction famously claimed they would never publish stories where a sci fi setting is interchangeable with an Old West setting. Curiously, even if mid-century American sci fi writers and editors were trying to separate themselves from the Western, sci fi filmmakers weren’t trying to do the same. I’m sure there are many reasons for this, but one I will note simply comes from those numbers I mentioned above. There are a lot of Western films, and that means Westerns made up a huge chunk of what Americans who loved movies watched if they were growing up in the ’40s or ’50s. When those people grew up to make their own movies in the ’60s and ’70s, the directors they looked to for inspiration included the likes of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Sergio Leone. Even so, it is true that basically nobody in Hollywood was making Westerns in the late ’70s. The more cynical revisionist Westerns and Sergio Leone’s Italian spaghetti Westerns were falling out of style, and we were more than a decade off from that early ’90s resurgence. Cinema, especially American cinema, was embracing a new era, one that included both the realist works of the New Hollywood auteurs on one hand and high-concept genre blockbuster films on the other. Director Peter Hyams wanted to make a Western anyway, even though everybody he talked to said it wasn’t possible. In a 2014 interview with Empire he recalled, “I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion—obviously after other people—that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space.” Hyams had been working in Hollywood for many years at that point, and he had already written and directed several films. Most of them turned out to be disappointments, both critically and financially; his biggest hit by that point had been the indie conspiracy thriller Capricorn One (1977), in which a reporter discovers that NASA is faking a manned mission to Mars. But for his next film he wanted to make a Western, and he wanted to set it in space, so that’s what he did. It was always going to be a risk to make any version of High Noon, and my opinion is that the results are mixed. There are some things I love about Outland, and there are some things that don’t work. I tend to think that it works best in places where it pulls away from the High Noon framework, and it falters where it’s trying to adhere to it, and as a whole it’s an interesting but flawed movie. One of the things I love is the setting. (I know, I know. Everybody is shocked—shocked!—that I love a story set in an isolated space mining outpost.) I love the big, industrial, labyrinthine feel of it. This is cinematic sci fi made in the tradition of Alien (1979), where ordinary workers toil away at their jobs in dented, worn, slightly grubby spaceships. Production designer Philip Harrison was obviously inspired by the look of Alien in his conception of the mine and refinery. The film also brought on model makers Martin Bower and Bill Pearson to build the miniatures; Bower and Pearson had previously worked on Alien, so the industrial designs of Outland were well within their wheelhouse. In a 2012 interview, they talk about building the models over the course of about three months, using everything they had on hand, which included cast-offs and leftovers from other films, a cat box, lampshades they purchased at a Woolworth’s in Slough, Bower’s mother’s used mascara tubes, and fifty scale models of the HMS Belfast. In that same interview, Bower describes how Hyams thought their meticulous, detailed models were too dark to film the way he wanted to film them, so he had the crew spray paint everything white, without consulting the model makers. As of 2012 Bower still seemed a little miffed about that, and one can hardly blame him. This also brings up another curious fact about Outland, which is that while Stephen Goldblatt is credited as the film’s cinematographer, just about everybody, including Goldblatt himself, says that he was just there because of union requirements, while Hyams did most of the film’s actual photography himself. Goldblatt did what he could, including learning about a filming process called Introvision, which allowed for the composition of visual effects in camera by combining live action with projected backgrounds. Introvision was only used for a few years before it was supplanted by digital composition, but we’ve all seen it in a few famous film scenes: the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) and the train wreck in The Fugitive (1993). This article in American Cinematographer about Sam Raimi’s Army of Darkness (1992) explains the process pretty well. Outland takes place on Jupiter’s moon Io, and it is entirely fair if you watch this film and wonder, like I did, “If that’s Io, where are the volcanoes? There should be volcanoes!” Voyagers 1 and 2 acquired photographic evidence of Io’s volcanic activity in 1979, and that discovery was indeed reported in the mainstream press. Perhaps this is excessive geological nitpicking, but Io’s volcanism is really freaking cool, so I feel justified in being a bit disappointed at the lack of volcanoes present when Outland went into production in 1980. The story goes like this: Federal space marshal William O’Niel (Sean Connery) is newly arrived at a huge corporate mining outfit on Io. He brought his wife and son (played Kika Markham and Nicholas Barnes) along for the new posting, but they are desperately unhappy, so his wife leaves to return to Earth and takes the kid with her. O’Niel wants to spend his timing moping, but people keep dying mysteriously at this mine, and he’s determined to find out why. Another thing I love about this movie is the fact that two people explode before the twenty-five-minute mark. I know that explosive decompression isn’t real; I know the movie is taking great liberties for shock value. I don’t care. I’m just going to pretend they’re exploding for other reasons. The deaths are alarming and intriguing, and it’s almost disappointing that O’Niel figures them out so quickly. He investigates with the help of the station doctor, Dr. Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), whom I love. I love her so much. I want to marry her. I want a whole movie about her. She’s grumpy and perfect. Lazarus is the one who discovers that the miners, much like the people who lived on the floor above me in college, are taking an amphetamine that gives them a lot of energy but also drives them crazy. O’Niel digs a little—he doesn’t have to look that hard—and figures out that the men bringing the drug to Io were hired by the outpost’s general manager, Mark Sheppard (Peter Boyle). I didn’t recognize Peter Boyle with hair and a beard, because I am of a generation who know Peter Boyle as Clyde Bruckman in The X-Files episode “Clyde Bruckman’s Final Repose.” He’s perfectly fine here, as is James B. Sikking as Montone, O’Niel’s sergeant. O’Niel confronts both Sheppard and Montone, who reveal themselves to be men who are fully aware they are participating in the worker-killing capitalist machine of corporate space mining; Montone is resigned but wary of O’Niel’s determination to do the right thing, whereas Sheppard seems tiredly amused at the marshal’s audacity and assumes the marshal just wants a bigger bribe. Thus far the movie has a bit of an odd tone, because a lot of it is playing out like a mystery where there really isn’t a mystery at all. The cause of the deaths and the men responsible are trivial for O’Niel to discover. There’s some sneaking and chasing and fighting through the station, which all looks cool, but I kept expecting some kind of plot twists or turns that never materialized. Once Sheppard knows O’Niel is onto him, the film shifts more fully in High Noon mode: Sheppard’s bosses are sending two assassins to kill O’Niel, and the whole facility knows they are due to arrive on the next supply ship. That starts the ticking clock that mirrors the structure of High Noon. That movie famously plays out in real time as Gary Cooper’s Marshal Kane prepares for the arrival of the noon train. Outland, thankfully, does not play out in real time as they wait the dozens of hours for the arrival of the supply ship. The ticking clock in High Noon works because Kane is a respected member of the community, and he is making an active decision to stay rather than leave. Hadleyville has been his home; he has real connections with the townspeople. So every friend, ally, and neighbor who refuses to help him because they are too frightened is another moral injury against a man who had thought he could count on them, and all of that is weighed against the pleading of his wife (Grace Kelly), a staunch pacifist who begs him to leave and avoid trouble. Outland’s O’Niel has no such connections in the facility; he only arrived a couple weeks ago and doesn’t seem to have made any friends. He obviously can’t just leave; Jupiter’s moons are a tiny bit more remote than New Mexico. Nor does he seem to have much expectation that anybody will help him. He isn’t anybody to them except a newcomer disrupting the status quo. That’s why the ending of Outland feels a bit flat to me, even though there is some nice cat-and-mouse action as O’Niel and the assassins try to trap each other. Overall, my feeling is that I wish the movie had done a bit more with its premise: more mystery in the explosive deaths, more hard choices for O’Niel to make, more sense of how his actions impact the facility. (Also, more volcanoes.) It’s a movie with a solid cast, a great setting, and a solid plot to explore. I enjoyed it, but I also found myself wishing it did more with everything it has going for it, because it doesn’t hit the story quite as hard as it could. What do you think of Outland? Where does it rank in your personal tier list of space Westerns? What other classic Westerns should be remade in space? Next week: Sure, why not, let’s watch RoboCop and afterward stare blankly at the wall to contemplate the grim reality of American police violence. Find streaming sources.[end-mark] The post <i>Outland</i>: Bringing the Wild West to Outer Space appeared first on Reactor.