Empire by Ian Nathan

This gritty sci-fi is undeservedly neglected and underrated.

Variety

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 New York Times by Vincent Canby

Outland is what most people mean when they talk about good escapist entertainment. It won't enlarge one's perceptions of life by a single millimeter, but neither does it make one feel like an idiot for enjoying it so much.

TV Guide Magazine

Connery and Boyle are fine, but the wholesale lifting of High Noon's plot (there's even an on-screen digital readout periodically displayed, counting down the minutes until the big confrontation) certainly undermines interest.

Newsweek by David Ansen

It doesn't help matters that Connery has been given a cardboard wife and child who--fed up with dingy space colonies-abandon him early on. They're ingredients, not characters. Once again, Hollywood's superlative technology has been squandered on an undernourished screenplay. [01 June 1981, p.91]

The New Yorker by Pauline Kael

Peter Hyams, who directed, knows how to stage chases and fights. But he also wrote this script, which deadens everything and doesn’t even make sense.

The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Rick Groen

Even without a chronological point of reference, Outland has an intriguingly realistic look. Unfortunately, both the realism and the intrigue begin and end with the sets. [25 May 1981]

Washington Post by Gary Arnold

The conventions that worked for High Noon break down in the high-tech atmosphere of Outland and the story seems trite and dinky. [23 May 1981, p.C6]

Time Out

Because both dialogue and direction are none too exciting, one's tired eyes wander endlessly over the space base sets, where there has been an overuse of that potent sci-fi movie convention which conveys 'realism' by showing that life on the outer limits will be as dingy and badly lit as a suburban subway, with all the usual vices.

Chicago Reader by Dave Kehr

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.