Ernie Hudson said that he took the role of Hawkins because he wanted to get as far away from civilization as he could following the making of the film The Crow (1994) and the death of its star, Brandon Lee.
The helicopter "gunship" is, in actuality, a Russian Kamov Ka-27 'Helix' anti-submarine helicopter. The Helix features a coaxial rotor, and thus looks unfamiliar (and thus potentially futuristic) to Western audiences.
Ray Liotta agreed to take the lead role of Robbins because he had always wanted to do an action movie where he played a heroic character.
Martin Campbell turned the movie down twice, but took the job because he needed the money to buy a house. He mentions this in the podcast 'The Movies that Made Me' (2021) to host Josh Olson.
The film is a loose adaptation of the 1987 novel "The Penal Colony" by Richard Herley. In the novel, the British government runs a prison island for convicts from it's mainland prisons. On those prison islands, new arrivals are dumped on the islands by helicopters where they must learn to survive and satellites are used to keep an eye on the convicts. A man named Anthony John Routledge, wrongly convicted of a sex-murder, is dumped on "Sert," a prison island off the north Cornish coast. There he soon learns that not all the convicts on the prison island are savage when he discovers a community of resourceful men, led by one man, and he sets out to forget the rules of living a civilized life.