Hacker Cinema
Outland
1981 · Film · 110 min
Directed by Peter Hyams
Science FictionActionThrillerCrime
On the sunless moon Io, Marshall William T. O’Niel goes toe-to-toe with the corrupt manager of a mining colony and his gang of roughnecks while investigating a rash of worker suicides.
3 positive1 negative1 mixed3 neutralfrom 8 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
8 comments on Hacker News
The complete opening sequence of Blade Runner is "fucking amazing". The entire movie is "fucking amazing". It is a beautiful, visually stunning masterpiece that I will never tire to look at complimented with a Vangelis soundtrack that ranks as one of the best in all of cinema. And a performance by Rutger Hauer that is pure artistic mastery. And has a woman ever looked as seductive as Sean Young smoking a cigarette as she's being interviewed by Harrison Ford at Tyrell Corp? Speaking of the opening sequence, even that computer animated Ladd Company tree is cool and which I have only seen one other time in "Outland", I think. The music that plays as that tree is being rendered seems to announce you are about to witness something extraordinary.
I'll add some films that I enjoyed. Some might be flawed, some constrained by their budget etc, but overall I enjoyed watching them. Ordered alphabetical (I hope).
The more mainstream ones:
- Brainstorm (1983)
- Gamer (2009)
- Midnight Special (2016)
- Pandorum (2009)
- Outland (1981)
- Possessor (2020)
The more low budget/indie ones:
- Alien Arrival (2016)
- Chariot (2022)
- The Endless (2018)
- Galaxy of Terror (1981)
- Honeymoon (2014)
- The man with the magic box (2017)
- The Objective (2008)
- Senn (2013)
- The Signal (2014)
- Time Trap (2017)
- Welcome the Stranger (2018)
I sense an 'Outland (1981)' scenario there.
https://imdb.com/title/tt0082869/
I like the diversity of non-Bond movies he did.
My favourites are probably Outland and Finding Forrester.
Whenever someone of this stature goes, I tend to gather together their films, what I have of them, and work through them. So here I am looking at Outland (which isn't as terrible as Harlan Ellison said but goodness it isn't great), Zardoz, In the Name of the Rose, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (it's fun, I will grant it that), Time Bandits and was left wondering: what films had his iconic performances? What's a good sample to understand the range he had?
I grew up with the Bond films so they're very much background to me, almost hard to notice in a way. Any recommendations?
The funny part about Outland is that it assumed men in the future doing offworld mining would all sport 70s hairstyles and smoke like chimneys. Go watch it again and look at the scene where they're having a meeting: the smoke is so thick in the conference room you can barely see anyone!
Of course, that movie had some other really serious problems: it seemed to assume that there was artificial gravity, but that it only worked inside the station, and stopped at the roof (so when a guy is walking around inside a tunnel, he's at Earth-normal gravity, but when another guy is making an ambush for him on the outside roof of this tunnel, he's in microgravity).
Yeah I think we need replicators, self-sealing stem bolts, programmable shape shifting materials, etc. I like the imagination that movies like Outland instilled, but realistically putting a full blown mining and smelt operation onto another world, even the moon? If we have a cable car all the way to moon, OK, but rockets?
> had assumed that a decade or two into the next millennium we'd live in neat little houses on suburban Earth, don suits to go to work in our (non-flying) car
But this is changing, it's not the 1950s any more. By a fifth of the way through the 21st century, it's quite common that
1) The business attire is often jeans and t-shirt
2) Women go to work almost as much as men
3) The couple in the "neat little houses" may not be married. Or may be the same gender and married. Or there may just be 1 person there.
4) Smoking is very uncommon
5) The work is sometimes from home, or your job might be moving to somewhere cheaper like a call-center in India or a factory in China.
7) The local mall is struggling due to online shopping.
8) people don't pre-plan their social engagements like they used to - they're always in contact with their friends so the era of "I'll meet you in the cinema lobby at 8" (or bust) is over. In fact the cinema might be netflix and chill at home.
9) The car might soon be self-driving.
These changes add up over time. This movie from 1981, supposedly set on Jupiter's moon Io in the late 21st century, has scenes that look very looks outdated to me, particularly a room full of men smoking: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0082869/