When journeyman director and screenwriter Peter Hyams expressed a desire to make a western — just a few years after his 1977 sci-fi hit Capricorn One — the response he got was less than enthusiastic. “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 Gleaming visions of the future had been replaced by dirty, dusty, rough-and-tumble ones — the perfect forum for Hyams’ idea for a film about life on the frontier: “I wanted to do something about Dodge City and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."
