Movie Music Archives #004: “Outland”
Plot outline: A marshal in outer space (Sean Connery) assigned to a remote mining colony refuses to look the other way when miners begin dying from a deadly narcotic designed to increase their productivity (patterned on the film “High Noon”, 1952)”.
We can’t confirm it, but we’re pretty sure that at some point in the pre-production on “Outland”, director Peter Hyams said to everyone else creatively involved “Okay, this film is gonna look and sound EXACTLY like ‘Alien’, capice?” Every single frame is lit and set-designed in such a way that any scene could be spliced into “Alien” and there’d be no jump in continuity, and one of the film’s poster taglines went so far as to proclaim: “Even in space, the ultimate enemy is man”, a play on the “Alien” tag of “In space no one can hear you scream”.
The incredible Jerry Goldsmith did the scores for both “Outland” and “Alien”, and, as with the the visual design, most of the music cues are vitually interchangeable between the two films. Lying in wait on the “Outland” soundtrack, however, is “The Rec Room”, the silly New Wave-y background music for the film’s “strip club of the future” sequence! It’s reminiscent of the music Goldsmith also did for the “nightclub orgy of the future” sequence in “Logan’s Run”.