Cinema: High Moon

OUTLAND

Directed and Written by Peter Hyams

In 1979 two events took place that inspired Peter Hyams to make this outerspace thriller. On March 9, the NASA space probe Voyager I discovered an erupting volcano on Io, the innermost Galilean moon of Jupiter; and on May 25, 20th Century-Fox released the film Alien. Io gave Hyams his setting: a futuristic mining colony that looks like a gigantic Tinkertoy. Alien provided much of the rest: a crew of steel-spined, me-first mercenaries stalked by a mysterious killer. (In Alien it was a mutating monster; here it...

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