Essay On Outland

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Closing the Final Frontier: Genre Analysis of Outland (1981)
Are all films that are set in space necessarily science fiction films? There are a few films that are labelled as science fiction regardless of the fact that the science aspect of the fiction is minimal. One such film is the 1981 film Outland, directed by Peter Hyams, which belongs to the Western genre more than it belongs to the science fiction genre, even though the setting of the film happens to be one of Jupiter’s moons.
According to Buscombe, “the major defining characteristics of a genre will be visual” (qtd. in Neale 14). This means that the formal elements that allow us to categorize Outland as belonging to the Western genre are primarily elements of the mise-en-scène. For example, the weapon that Marshal O’Niel uses is an old-fashioned shotgun; it thwarts the expectation that …show more content…

According to the director Peter Hyams, the Western genre had fallen out of fashion by 1981, but he wanted to make a Western regardless, and therefore he put his Western in space (Williams). Visual iconography of the Western genre is used ironically, for example, the area where the deputies rest is labelled a “saloon” by bold red letters, and even the doors resemble iconic Western saloon doors. It feels too anachronistic and excessive to be anything but irony. O’Niel’s shotgun and star-shaped badge function in the same way: they are iconography of the Western genre, but used in an anachronistic setting and in a self-conscious way. The narrative of the film is an appropriation of the narrative of High Noon, but set in the future as an attempt to appeal to its contemporary audiences, because it was after Westerns had already fallen out of favor with audiences. The ironic use of the visual imagery of Westerns and the appropriation of a famous Western narrative, repurposed and rehabilitated, are what makes this film a film of the latter phase of the Western

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