A desire to make a western met resistance because the genre was considered dead. The western’s classic box-office appeal had faded, but its themes and tropes reappeared in science fiction, including space operas and gritty action films. The frontier hardship idea became Outland, starring Sean Connery as William O’Niel, a worn federal marshal sent for a year to a titanium mining colony on Io. The colony’s grungy, cramped conditions push families away, and O’Niel is pressured to maintain order. After suicides and mental breakdowns, O’Niel traces the cause to a drug that increases stamina and productivity, revealing a destructive cost to the colony’s survival.
"“Everybody said, 'You can't do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western,'” Hyams told Empire magazine. “I remember thinking it was weird that this genre that had endured for so long was just gone. But then I woke up and came to the conclusion - obviously after other people - that it was actually alive and well, but in outer space.”"
"Hyams was right on both counts: the western in its classic form was largely box office poison by the early 1980s, but many of the tropes of the genre had found their way into science fiction films like Star Wars and its many imitators, as well as entries like Alien and Mad Max. Gleaming visions of the future had been replaced by dirty, dusty, rough-and-tumble ones - the perfect forum for Hyams' idea for a film about life on the frontier: “I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was.”"
"The result was Outland, starring Sean Connery as William O'Niel, a weary, vulnerable (and very un-James-Bond-like) federal marshal assigned to a year-long tour of duty at a titanium mining colony on Io, Jupiter's hellish, volcanic third moon. The mine's workers, administrators, and support staff live in a claustrophobic, grungy, warren-like base atop the mines; the conditions are so inhospitable to family life that O'Niel's wife and young son bail after two weeks."
"O'Niel is told by the general manager, Sheppard (a snarling Peter Boyle of Young Frankenstein fame), that if he toes the line and keeps order, he'll do fine. Then a string of inexplicable suicides and bouts of insanity among the workers is traced by O'Niel to a drug that boosts one's stamina and productivity, but ul"
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