Heavily indebted to Fred Zinnemann’s High Noon, Outland updates the earlier film’s Red Scare paranoia with a more topical anxiety about growing conglomeration and capitalist power.

While there are several mile-wide plot holes and one key under-developed main character, the film emerges as a tight, intriguing old-fashioned drama that gives audiences a hero worth rooting for.

The failure of director-writer Peter Hyams to put any weight whatever behind the moral issues (crude as they are) makes this merely violent nonsense.

A movie with stylish futuristic special effects, a love of the Western genre, and a garbled, ambivalent relationship to its own Reagan/Thatcherite present.