Review of Outland (1981) by Matthew S — 25 May 2010

What you've got here is a pretty simple, but also very classic-feeling, story about a new cop trying to change his new surroundings for the better. The characters and location could have used some fleshing out to give the viewer more reason to care about what was going on, and the whole thing started out pretty slow, although I think that's pretty typical for older sci-fi films. I think the scenery could have probably also used some work; far too many movies set "realistically" in space have everything set in a very white, very sterile, very homogeneous environment, even today. I would be interested in how a remake of this would turn out.

Also interesting: there's a chase scene in here with some very parkour-like action, something that didn't become common in films until quite recently.