Cinema
Lost in space
Peter Ackroyd
Outland (' AA', selected cinemas) Deep space is now the only area where cinema audiences feel completely at home: the eerie music composed by John Williams and performed by one symphony orchestra or another, those credits filing across the screen as if a digital watch were playing a dead march, the first sight of the transparent tubes which Richard Rodgers has designed on commission from the Space Authorities, that air of febrile modernity previously associated only with World Fairs. All this, and the heavens too.
There was a time, though, when science fiction seemed very exciting, very fresh: even ten years ago the implication of such films was that we were witnessing the lineaments of the future — that we had better see what we were getting into, familiarise ourselves with the terrain and, if possible, come to like it. But now, when we sense that our science is not leading us in that direction at all, when the Voyager missions show evidence of phenomena so inexplicable that we feel more at ease with the constellations of Greek mythology, we now settle back and enjoy science fiction as a kind of joke, a comfortable dream which makes no demands upon us and which we, in our turn, no longer expect to be demanding.
The makers of Outland realise this too — only too well — and have decided that a moon or a space station can be used as hermetically sealed environments designed specifically for the purposes of soap opera. A mining community has been established upon lo, where the workers spend most of their time drinking or whoring. If it were not for the spacesuits and the occasional references to scrambling devices, it might as well be Leadville, Colorado. Even the saloon bars have swing doors. And then a new marshal arrives, and starts investigating a previously undiscerned sequence of suicides. He discovers that the miners have been taking a drug which increases their ability to work but which, later, persuades them to depressurise their spacesuits, walk out onto the lunar landscape, or attack the local prostitutes with knives. It turns out that 'the Company' has itself been supplying the drug — the only concession to the modern conscience which the film-makers allow. The marshal fights against the system: 'There's a whole machine that works because everyone does what they're supposed to . . . that's what's in the programme'. The relevance of this remark to Outland itself may perhaps be intentional, since the plot now becomes so predictable. as to be parodic. The marshal waits for a posse of gunmen who are coming to shoot him down; the community seal their spacesuits and float off in the other direction. In other words, the makers of the film have simply adopted the plot of High Noon and taken it to that place where there is no noon and no midnight, a kind of High Nothing.
What we get, as a result, is the worst of both worlds — a science fiction film which is used as the vehicle for an orthodox fantasy, and a drama of suspense which is continually being side-tracked by futuristic hardware: when someone bleeds here, the drops go upwards. I imagined I was ready for anything in the contemporary cinema: Goldie Hawn pretending to be lovable, a Polish trilogy about the plight of a television engineer, a documentary about Rastafarians. But there is something uniquely enervating about a film such as this, which simply conflates two banal scenarios without any pretence at invention or accuracy. Here we have old-fashioned guns, telephones and knives scattered alongside air-locks and incredibly sophisticated medical machinery . . . English parents have an American child . . . and so on. Since we guess the end of the plot as soon as it begins, the only suspense available is that of the orthodox 'horror' kind. When two people speak to each other for more than a minute, one knows that something dreadful is about to happen. The shocks, when they do come, have already been anticipated by something like 20 seconds — audiences now simply go through the motions of being excited by such things, as if they were attending a Sunday school picnic.
The only possible motive for attending this film is for the spectacle of Sean Connery in a spacesuit — we have, after all, seen him in practically everything else. But he does not perform; he exists. He enunciates his words as if they were already a recorded message; his walnut features so dark and so closely packed that they might have just been removed from a bottle of embalming fluid. As someone says to him, 'When you start speaking in sentences of less than two words, I know you are worried'. But Mr Connery keeps cool, even in Outland; he is the thespian equivalent of some neighbourhood corner shop — he has never knowingly over-acted.
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