“I wanted to do a Western. Everybody said, ‘You can’t do a Western; Westerns are dead; nobody will do a Western’. 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. I wanted to make a film about the frontier. Not the wonder of it or the glamour of it: I wanted to do something about Dodge City and how hard life was."
Peter Hyams on Outland
In spite of this obvious corollary, they have a well-established habit of showing movies that have NOTHING to do with science fiction or fantasy: Jaws, The A Team, Dead Calm, Treasure Island, and so on. This actually puzzles me quite a bit - is it because of budgetary reasons or some kind of unfortunate contract for package purchasing of programming? It's certainly not lack of more appropriate content existing.
The most recent example of this odd predilection is their showing of The Magnificent Seven, in the form of the 2016 remake of the classic 1960 western, which was in turn based on the 1954 Japanese film Seven Samurai. The 2016 version has a good cast and does an acceptable job of reworking the original, but with the best will in the world, it's certainly not science fiction.
What makes this an even stranger programming decision is the fact that there actually is a science fiction remake of the 1960s version: the 1980 cult classic Battle Beyond the Stars, produced by Roger Corman, the king of B-movies. Admittedly, calling Battle Beyond the Stars a B-movie is generous, it's probably a C+ at best, or maybe even a D, but it has the minor cachet of featuring Robert Vaughn, one of the actors from the original western version, playing essentially the same role as 20 years earlier.
The idea of remaking westerns as science fiction films is not as odd as it sounds. It's easy to see the parallels between the Wild West and the colonization of outer space: an unexplored frontier full of unknown dangers and potential riches, plagued by extended travel times, limited communications, enforced isolation and, in some situations, the perils of an indifference to civilized laws and strictures in the interests of money.
One of the best examples of this comparison would have to be Outland, a deliberate reimagining of High Noon, the classic 1952 Gary Cooper film.* Outland, a 1981 release from writer/director Peter Hyams, features Sean Connery as Federal District Marshal William T. O'Niel**, who is charged with keeping the peace on an isolated mining colony on Io, Jupiter's fifth moon. As in High Noon, O'Niel is abandoned by friends, family and colleagues and left to fight on his own when a corrupt mining administrator sends for hired killers to eliminate him.Joss Whedon's space opera series Firefly owes a similar debt to the past - part of his inspiration for the concept came from John Ford's 1939 movie Stagecoach and its ensemble cast, as well as the situation facing Confederate soldiers following their loss in the United States Civil War.
All that aside, if they just had to show something with a Western feel to it for some reason, Space could have shown Westworld, this doesn't have to be complicated. Or Cowboys versus Aliens. Or, if they were really desperate, Wild Wild West.
Okay, I was bluffing - if Wild Wild West is my only other choice, Magnificent Seven it is. After all, have you ever noticed how much the exploration of the West is like the colonization of outer space...?
- Sid
* And the film's gritty art direction is heavily influenced by Alien, to the point where people sometimes think that the two movies are somehow in the same timeline.
** Or O'Neil, the name tag on his uniform actually changes from shot to shot.
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