2009 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – WALL-E

Normally, I’d cover this category in the first week of covering a year, but this is actually my last “catch-up” review (at least, unless I start tackling short fiction Hugo winners somewhere down the line), and I wanted to end on a high note. And it doesn’t get much higher than this.

I adore this movie; that’s about the only way to describe my reaction to it. It’s my favorite Pixar film, and that’s saying a lot. It’s a masterpiece of animation, of science fiction, just of film in general. It takes place in the 28th century, on an Earth so polluted that it has become inhospitable to life. Robots have been given the task of collecting the mountains of trash that litter (pun!) the planet and condense and stack them, but most of the robots (called “Wall-E” units) have worn out, except for one resourceful little guy who replaces his own worn out parts. He manages to find some pleasure in his dreary work, collecting little pieces that amuse him to decorate a little lair. He also loves “Hello Dolly!” One day, a more advanced, feminine robot shows up to look for plant life, and Wall-E falls in love. When they do discover a sprout, a spaceship picks them up, and they end up running around on a space cruiseship amidst a decadent consumer culture of the surviving humans as they try to trigger a recolonization and renewed clean-up of Earth.

The robots all have limited speech, yet they get most of the screentime, so the film is short on dialog, and yet it moves briskly and manages to entertain and keep forward momentum. I haven’t seen physical storytelling this funny, effective and powerful outside of Charlie Chaplin. And, Wall-E does a great job balancing a bleak vision of future Earth, right out of those ‘70s eco-dystopias, with the beauty in the trash. Nothing hits my aesthetic sweet-spot quite like a sense of wonder, hope or love in the midst of ruin and despair, and few movies hit that sweet-spot as perfectly as this. It’s also a rich sf film full of references to the sf canon: 2001, Star Wars, and, hey, Sigourney Weaver even makes an appearance. There are lots of cool rockets and robots to boot. I can’t say that the film asks probing speculative questions about robot emotions – Wall-E and EVE are in love; deal with it.

The film isn’t particularly nuanced or detailed in the environmental questions it raises either. There’s a satire of consumerism with the brand Buy N’ Large (fronted by the almost-always welcome Fred Willard), but it’s pretty broad. Also, of all the environmental problems we face, burying ourselves in trash really isn’t one of them – landfills may be an eyesore that no one wants in their backyard, but there is ample space for our trash. But, mountains of trash and yellow noxious sky serve as a strong enough metaphor. People may have found the critiques here heavy-handed, but, considering the state of climate change legislation in the US, maybe people do need to be smacked in the head with broad metaphors. Again and again. And then some more. And the film, for all of the dirty, trashy, hopeless world it depicts, still gives us that sprout, and still has its bloated consumerist humans stand up for hope in the end. And I love it for that.

Grade: A

2008 Hugo Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – STARDUST

Neil Gaiman’s had a pretty good decade at the Hugos. Something written by Gaiman (or adapted from something written by Gaiman, in this case) won in 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2008, and 2009, he received nominations in 2000, 2007 and 2010, and he declined a nomination in 2006. I guess he took 2005 off. Anyway, there’s been some grumbling about this, and even a New Yorker profile of Gaiman spent most of its space mocking his rabid fanbase. So, when you see a movie like Stardust, which did mediocre box office then promptly disappeared from most of the world’s consciousness (my wife claimed to have never heard of it*), well, it’s easy to chalk this up to Gaiman’s fanbase tipping another Hugo vote. Thing is, it’s actually a very cute movie.

The English town of Wall lies next to a giant stone wall that divides our world and a magical land called Stormhold. Tristan Thorne (a relative unknown named Charlie Cox) is a teenager who works in a shop in Wall and loves a girl named Victoria (Sienna Miller), who prefers the wealthier Humphrey (Clark Kent). To prove his love, Tristan promises to recover a falling star from the other side of the wall, then learns from his father that his long lost mother may be on the other side as well. Tristan finds the star personified as a young woman named Yvan (Clare Danes) and leads her back to the wall. Meanwhile, an evil witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) hunts the star so she can consume its heart and regain her youth, and the surviving princes of Stormhold search for a necklace she wears so that they can ascend to the throne. Matthew Vaughn directs and manages to keep things light and make everything look good despite a moderate (though by no means small) budget.

When I saw the film in the theaters, I walked away with the impression that it was a bit of a mess. There are a couple of minor continuity errors and some awkward voice-overs that suggested a lot of late tinkering to me. There are also a couple of obnoxious celebrity cameos. I like Ricky Gervais, but he seems to be playing a parody of himself in a couple of brief scenes. Robert DeNiro has a bigger part with a few surprises, and I honestly didn’t know whether to laugh or look away in embarrassment for most of his screentime. It’s a good idea (that I won’t give away), but the humor's a little too broad, and DeNiro doesn’t entirely succeed. I’ve never liked him in a comedic role, and this film didn’t buck that trend, even if it’s not as bad as the Fokkers stuff.

Those are really minor issues though.  Everyone else does quite well, despite much of the main cast being a mix of unknowns and used-to-bes. Gaiman’s plot is charming as hell, Vaughn’s touch is light but effective, and, overall, it’s a very sweet, fun film. I hardly noticed the minor errors this time, and I think my impression from my first viewing was just off. The film flowed quite smoothly, as long as you’re not being hypercritical.

So, as I said, very cute movie. Normally, “very cute” doesn’t necessarily make for a worthy Hugo winner, but when you look at the rest of the field…yeah. Harry Potter 5 was decent, but Golden Compass was very disappointing, Enchanted doesn’t really rise above Disney kids fare (though I’ve only seen pieces of it on cable, and Heroes season one was fascinating, but flawed (and its reputation was sunk by the awful seasons to follow, so it’s good it didn’t win). This is actually the one year where I’d support Jo Walton’s contention that “no award” should win Hugos for Dramatic Presentation more often, but Stardust is the best film of the lot, and I don’t mind it being on the list of winners at all.

Grade: B+

*but she watched it with me this time and really enjoyed it.

2007 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – PAN’S LABYRINTH

The 2007 Long Form nominees are probably the finest class the Hugos ever had.  This is the first time I’d take the Hugo film nominees over the Oscar nominees.  It’s great that Scorcese finally got an Oscar, but The Departed is not his best film, and if you want a brilliant and twisty tale about identity, I’d go with The Prestige first. The best foreign language film about conflict in the ‘40s might have been Letters from Iwo Jima…but Pan’s Labyrinth is a lot more original.  I didn’t see Babel, but I’ve heard it’s a ridiculously depressing tale by a Mexican director, and I doubt it’s as good as Children of Men..also a depressing film by a Mexican director. Little Miss Sunshine may be quirky and fun, but it can’t be as quirky A Scanner Darkly, though drug-induced paranoia isn’t half as freaky as child beauty pageants. And, who needs a meditation on the ambiguous duties of the modern British monarchy like The Queen, when you can just cheer for blowing up the British government in V for Vendetta?  It’s an across-the-board sweep!

It’s also interesting that we had three dystopias and a fantasy set in the real-world dystopia of fascist-controlled Spain.  It’s a dark set of movies, and Pan’s Labyrinth is a real contender for darkest of all. In 1944, a young girl named Ofelia moves in with her new stepfather at an isolated estate in Spain. Ofelia’s mother is pregnant, and her new stepfather is a monstrous captain in the fascist military that has seized control of the country in a long Civil War. The Captain is rooting out one of the last bands of resistance fighters, and much of the movie is concerned with this fight.  Ofelia’s best friend in the household, a servant woman named Mercedes, is in love with one of the resistance fighters and secretly aiding them.

Ofelia, horrified by her stepfather and neglected by her mother, discovers/retreats into a fantasy world that she reaches through a labyrinth on the estate.  She meets an ancient faun who tells her that she is a lost princess from a fantasy kingdom, and after she completes three tasks, she can return there. The tasks pit Ofelia against funky cgi creatures. At first, her adventures cause some slight friction with her family as she disappears and returns covered in muck, but they seem far removed from the violent conflicts of the region.  Slowly, however, they force Ofelia to respond to and confront her stepfather’s cruelties.

I can’t say that I liked this film better than Children of Men or The Prestige, but I do think it’s a fitting winner because it’s essentially about the politics and ethics of fantasy.  The film is the brainchild or director/writer Guillermo del Toro, who made some mainstream genre films for the US, including the Hellboy movies.  Del Toro grew up steeped in comics and fantasy, and his works are all very much in that world.  He’s kind of a fanboy. He also has an incredible imagination, and his designs for some of the creatures are what first captured attention for this film (see the trailer for how).

Guillermo del Toro is as familiar as anyone with old accusations that genre fiction is escapist, and somehow, therefore, less worthy than realistic fiction. Pan’s Labyrinth is a powerful statement on this subject (mush like Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, which came out a few months later), as we see the importance of escapism in Ofelia’s life, as well as the role that fantasy eventually plays in undermining the captain.  It’s a sharp and personal testimonial from del Toro, wrapped up in a beautiful and affecting package. The Hugos could hardly go wrong with this set of nominees, but I’m especially happy with this result.



Grade: A-

2006 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – SERENITY

Firefly ended with a whimper in December 2002 when Fox finally broadcast the pilot.  Yippee.  Just in time.  The last episode produced was a very well-made, tense episode written and directed by Joss Whedon and full of existentialist philosophy.  It’s good, but not much of an ending, especially since a guest star steals most of the scenes from the regular cast.  Luckily, Firefly did well enough on DVD that Universal gave Whedon the chance to make a feature length film that wraps things up quite nicely.

The differences from the regular series are rather dramatic.  The lighting is better, the effects are superior, and the stakes are higher.  Generally, all of these changes are for the better…though there’s now sound in space battles.  The film dives into the central unresolved plotline of the series: what exactly has the Alliance government done to the girl River, and what will be her and her brother’s fates as runaways from the powerful interplanetary government.  The government hires an assassin (the excellent Chiwetel Ejiofor) to track River down, and he draws her out by triggering her to beat up a bar full of people.  Mal and the Serenity crew go on the run, and stumble upon a secret colony and hints about the origins of the brutal, mindless Reavers that plague space.  It’s fast-paced and full of action.  On its own, the fact that character moments tend to be overwhelmed by the fighting and the chasing and the shooting and the stabbing would be a problem.  But, as the pay-off of an entire season of a character-focused show, it’s perfect.

So, it’s a great capstone.  I know a lot of people who have watched the film without the show and enjoyed it find, but I think it comes off best as an over-sized, bigger-than-television series finale for a show that clearly deserved one.  It’s not perfect – there are a few clichéd absurdities (people always live long enough to give a dying speech; an impossible to reach piece of equipment straight out of Galaxy Quest), but I found them pretty easy to overlook.  My only real problem with Serenity is that there’s no more material with these characters (well, except for some comics).

Grade: A

2005 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, Long Form – THE INCREDIBLES

The Incredibles is the first Pixar movie (and the first Disney movie) to win the Hugo (through three of their five previous had been nominated), the first fully animated film, and the first superhero film. The rise of computer animation over the past decade is so obvious that it’s hardly worth mentioning, and we’ve already discussed superheroic domination of the summer blockbuster. The Hugos have sort of resisted these trends in their winners, but I guess the combination proved undeniable.

Mr. Incredible, one of America’s greatest superheroes, has a series of misadventures on his way to a wedding with another superhero, Elastigirl. He saves the day, but along the way he alienates the president of his fan club by denying him a sidekick role, and he wracks up a couple of lawsuits from a prevented suicide and a train crash. This opens a pandora’s box of superhero liability, and eventually the government steps in to pay legal fees in exchange for the superhero community going into collective retirement. Years later, Incredible and Elastigirl have settled into typical suburban lives. Their daughter can turn invisible and their son is superfast, but they try to prevent their children from using their powers in order to keep their cover. Mr. Incredible is restless though, and he jumps at a chance to do a special job fighting a robot on an isolated island. He gets back into the game, commissioning a new costume, but then uncovers a supervillain’s plot that draws his whole super-family into action.

At the risk of sounding like a curmudgeon or a contrarian, I don’t like this movie as much as everyone else I know. Let me be clear, I like it. I like it a lot. I just don’t love it. It’s closer to the bottom of my personal Pixar rankings…which still puts it above most movies out there. I have two big problems of varying degrees of nitpickiness. Nitpickiest first: there’s a big part of me that wishes this were a Fantastic Four movie. The powers, and a lot of the set up, are straight out of the epic, genius sixties superhero-family comics of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The similarities are numerous enough to bother me (and the FF movies are awful – so unfair), but I know I should just get over this. My second problem, which I think is a more legitimate issue, is that the political message is really weird. Writer/director Brad Bird is claiming that society forces exceptional people to hide their talents, which feels a lot like a straw man to me. I don’t really see this problem in the world. The villain’s grudge is that he doesn’t have powers, and one of his threats is that he’ll distribute his magnificent inventions to the people to put them on par with people with superpowers. The inventions themselves seem to negate his grudge and keeping technology from the masses just so powered people can feel their full specialness just seems petty. I really don’t get it. I’m probably thinking about it a lot harder than I’m supposed to.

While I’m complaining about a universally beloved film, I’ll go all in and add that the animation is showing its age a bit. It looks fantastic, but the limits if the character animation and the static nature of some of the backgrounds go a long way to showing how quickly computer animation advances. It’s still dazzling and gorgeous, but more recent Pixar pics are even moreso.

Okay, now that I’ve got all that off my chest, I will say this is a very fun movie, and one of the best superhero films of all time. It does look great, despite being long-in-the-tooth in computer animation terms, and the character dynamics are interesting and rich. I would say that Eternal Sunshine should have won, and I also prefer Prisoner of Azkaban and Spider-Man 2. But these are four great films (the fifth nominee Sky Captain…not so much), so I’m not really complaining.

Grade: B+

2004 Hugo Drama Long Form and 2003 Saturn Fantasy – RETURN OF THE KING

This is the first of the 40+ award-winning films I’ve covered here to also win an Academy Award for Best Picture.  It also won in all ten of the other Oscar categories that it was nominated for, including Best Director for Peter Jackson.  This was what we call a “phenomenon.”  The movie is impressive in a lot of ways: the battle scenes are bigger than ever, Minas Tirith looks fantastic, and there are many emotional moments between the characters.  There’s a lot of jesting about the homoeroticism of these films, but I think it is fair to say that there is some kind of love story between Sam and Frodo.  That’s clearest in this entry, as we see their ups and downs, Gollum and the Ring competing for their affections, their final triumph, and their bittersweet parting.  All of this gives the film more emotional weight than a lot of the fantasy fare out there.

So, this entry works very well, but I do consider the Academy’s recognition to be for the series as a whole, rather than just this one entry.  This particular film has some of the series’ highest highs, but I think is also has some of the biggest flaws.   The largest is the pacing: most of the first half is taken up with another giant battle; Frodo and Sam are all but forgotten, then the entire nature of the film changes at the halfway point as they take center stage.  It’s an odd flow of momentum.  And, of course, there’s the extra-long ending.

It’s as if Jackson, realizing what he had accomplished, decided to take a victory lap with the epilogue.  And then another one.  And then one more.  True, it’s shorter than the post-climax meanderings of the novel, which actually starts a whole ‘nother plot.  I’m sure Tolkeinistas could dissertate all night on how crucial the scouring of the Shire is to J.R.R.’s masterpiece, but I, and many others I know, think that cutting that plotline is one of the key areas where the films are better than the books.  Even with that gone, however, the movie still takes it sweet time ending after the big moment.  I do think that everyone fading off to the West is thematically crucial to the series, but it certainly could have been done more efficiently.

There’s also a pretty hefty cheesiness factor to all of these movies.  If you get caught up in the action, as most any fantasy fan would, it’s easy to miss some of this.  But, Peter Jackson has a lot of cornball maneuvers in his repertoire – jerky slo-mo, melodramatic slo-mo, characters gleaming in the sun, fake-out deaths, fake-out endings, to name a few.  And, he gets some of the mushiest performances that I’ve ever seen out of his actors.  As I said at the beginning of my Fellowship review though – it all works.  It’s the perfect pairing of director and material.  When adapting Tolkien, who self-consciously wrote a painfully sincere and old-fashioned story, this all works beautifully.  Remaking King Kong is another story altogether.

So, in summation (as if you didn't already know), these are excellent movies.

Grade: A

2003 Hugo Drama Long Form and 2002 Saturn Fantasy – THE TWO TOWERS

It hasn’t been long since I last spoke about Peter Jackson’s excellent adaptation of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy.  The quality remains just as high in this middle entry.  In fact, this used to be my favorite of the three.  We’re past the heavy exposition of the first film, and we don’t have to deal with lengthy epilogues like the final film.

As far as the plot is concerned, not all that much happens.  Frodo and Sam begin the film walking to Mordor, and they end the film still walking to Mordor.  The other characters get involved in a major battle with orcs, but it’s really just a dress rehearsal for the bigger fights to come in the next film.  It’s okay that the plot stalls out though, as it gives the characters some breathing room and allows for some nice world-building.  The more we see of the bonds between these characters and the impacts of the coming war on the people of Middle Earth, the higher the stakes feel in the end.

The one new element here, which garnered much of the attention at the time, is the cg Gollum.  An effects team captures a brilliant, highly physical performance by actor Andy Serkis, and translates it to the bony, impossibly old, riddle-loving freak.  Gollum could be really annoying (he is in most adaptations), but he works pretty well here.

There’s also some nice walking trees.  And, it climaxes with an epic siege/battle at Helm’s Deep, which is probably the best action sequence of the series.  The focus on warfare in the second-half of the entry raises the stakes, and Jackson even manages to push an environmentalist theme (he argues that there is a favoring of pastoral hobbits and trees over Saurumon’s industrial orc-army in the books – I gather this comes out of Tolkien criticism, but I never really saw it in the books other than as a byproduct of Tolkien's anti-modernism. Either way, I like it here).  The filmmakers even try to include some women in one of literature’s greatest sausage fests by expanding the role of Eowyn (played by Miranda Otto).

I didn’t mention the acting last time.  Serkis, as already mentioned, is great. Ian McKellan is one of the best living actors, and his performance is truly amazing.  He has an incredibly expressive face.  Jonathan Rhys-Meyers steals a lot of scenes as the dwarf Boromir, and his comic banter with Orlando Bloom’s is a big ingredient in what makes Helm’s Deep so fun.  Bloom, Viggo Mortensen, and the hobbits all do fine jobs playing pretty dull, button-down characters.

As I said, it was my favorite in the theaters, but I don’t know if it stands up to repeat viewings as well as the others (especially Fellowship).  Maybe this is because I usually watch the extended versions these days, and the additional material is mostly unnecessary Merry and Pippen comedic bits.  Anyway, it’s still great.  I’ll probably be able to come up with a few things to complain about with the next movie.

Grade: A

2002 Hugo Dramatic and 2001 Saturn Fantasy – THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING

I’ve speculated a few times on this blog about fantasy’s recent dominion over science fiction, both commercially (as reflected in sales) and critically (as reflected in these awards).  Is it less confidence of science, more pessimism about the future, or that fantasy is a genre that is – for whatever reason – more welcoming to female readers?  Today I feel like offering an alternative hypothesis: in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, fantasy just got really good.  Joss Whedon and Neil Gaiman give us great, popular urban fantasy works.  George R. R. Martin creates a new, beloved fantasy world, and J. K. Rowling does the same on another order of magnitude.  And, of course, Peter Jackson skillfully adapts the greatest fantasy book series of all time into the greatest fantasy film series of all time. Of course fans are going to have fantasy on the brain.

I feel silly recounting the plot.  What sf fan hasn’t read the books, or at least seen the films, probably several hundred times apiece? There’s a powerful, evil magic ring.  Some peaceful little people have to take it to a volcano and throw it in, and various wizards, dwarves, elves, and knights try to escort them, while really ugly things try to kill them.  It starts as an epic, takes a few quiet moments in the shire, then gets even epic-ier.

Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson is such a perfect pairing of director and subject – it elevates both.  Peter Jackson’s other films just don’t measure up to this one (don’t get me started on his King Kong), and, I’m sure this is some sort of heresy, I prefer this version of Tolkien’s masterpiece to the original.  Tolkien, like all of the fantasy writers who’ve followed him, can be a bit dry and effected.  Jackson is bombastic, over-the-top, and painfully sincere (the last is an odd trait for someone with roots in low-budget horror).  Put the two together, and you get movie magic.

Jackson’s most important trait is his love of the material.  I’m not sure any other director would have lobbied so hard to film The Lord of the Rings simultaneously then release it as three big budget films; he got New Line to put a lot on the line for these films (though it more than paid off for them).  I don’t know if any other director would have micromanaged the effects house WETA to create such a rich and detailed world for these characters to inhabit. It's a nice parallel to Tolkien's obsession with creating languages and mythologies for Middle Earth.  Furthermore, Jackson does, especially in this film, remain amazingly close to the material.  Sorry Tom Bambadil fans, those scenes weren’t necessary and wouldn’t have played well.  Pretty much everything else is in here.

The result is amazing.  It manages to capture everything that makes fantasy a beloved genre: the sense of scale, the creation of a foreign, yet familiar, world with its own sense of a deep history, the action, the morality.  And there's that extra fine touch, that not enough of Tolkien's many copycats have followed, of centering his story around very humble protagonists.  Everything looks great and the movie moves quickly through a lot of exposition.  The sequence in the Mines of Moria is one of the most exciting in sf movie history.  And, with focuses on male friendship, the film manages to be fun, AND be about something.  Jackson really gets the series off on the right foot.

Grade: A

2001 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON

Whenever the topic of all-time favorite movie comes up, I'll give a different answer almost every time. There are a few films that keep popping up though: Citizen Kane, The Searchers, Dr Strangelove, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade… And, among that vaunted set of films is this one, a Kung-Fu masterpiece by the brilliant Taiwanese director Ang Lee. 

The film, based on a Chinese novel from the 1930s, follows a set of legendary martial artists from the Giang Hu underworld during the Qing dynasty. Li Mu Bai (Chow Yun Fat) is contemplating retirement and can’t find peace due to his love for fellow wandering fighter Yu Shu Lien (Michelle Yeoh). On a visit to Beijing, Li Mu Bai’s ancient and powerful Green Dragon Sword is stolen by Jun Yu (Ziang Ziyi), a martial arts prodigy who is also an aristocratic girl soon to have an arranged marriage with a man she doesn’t love. The evil Jade Fox, who killed Li Mu Bai’s master to steal a secret training manual, has trained Jen. There are also a few subplots involving Jen’s true love and an undercover police officer who has vowed to find and kill Jade Fox.

It sounds complex when I write it out like that, but it’s actual a very straightforward story that never gets in the way of a series of stunning fight scenes while also managing to give those scenes importance and thematic resonance. The characters can fight like superhumans, but they have a much harder time declaring their feelings and navigating conflicts between freedom and duty. The film also explores gender issues in a way that few action films have. All of the best fighters, except for Li Mu Bai, are women. There’s a nice parallel between Jen, who fights to follow her heart, and Shu Lien, who represses her feelings. Even the villainess, Jade Fox, finds her initial motivation in the Wudang school’s refusal to train women.

There’s plenty of interesting character and story work here, and I think that’s what most sets this apart from most other films in the genre. But, the fight scenes, with amazing wire work by Yuen Woo-Ping (who also did The Matrix) are also fantastic. There’s a real emphasis on the grace of the often weightless-seeming characters, and Lee does an excellent job of capturing the precision of the moves without losing the action. It’s a mixture of clarity and speed that very few directors (especially in the West) manage to capture.

On top of all of that the scenery is gorgeous, the characters’ backstories are rich and efficiently conveyed, and their relationships and fates are genuinely moving. I can’t really judge the dialogue; the subtitles come across a bit wooden, but that’s as close as I can come to a genuine complaint. I think this film is damn near perfect.

I do think this is another instance where we can play one of my least favorite games: “is it sf?” The fantasy elements are pretty clear, what with the characters flying all over the screen, but I would object that those are established conventions of another genre: wuxia (martial arts). It’s like saying that Sin City must be sf because its Noir conventions are unrealistic. By that logic, it’s a short leap to calling soap operas like General Hospital speculative fiction, because, well, they’re certainly not realistic fiction. But, as I’ve said before, I try not to get too caught up in that debate. It only bothers me here because it seems to ignore the existence of a genre with its own long history. That said, I can’t blame Hugo voters for recognizing a film that I truly love, which also happens to be the first non-English language film to ever win this category. I love this choice, and I'm sure I would have voted with the majority.

Grade: A

2011 Hugo Nominee: Dramatic Presentation, Long Form - INCEPTION, written and directed by Christopher Nolan (Warner)

I think I fell in love with Inception right around the ten minute mark, and I never looked back. I tend not to rewatch movies a lot (there’s so many great films I haven’t seen yet, after all), but I’ve seen this one a few times. It’s a film about levels of dreaming that has quite a few levels itself, and yet it still works on the most basic surface level as a fast-paced heist/action film.

Technology exists to shape and share dreams. This is most often used for industrial espionage - it’s a rather elaborate way to steal secrets. Dom Cobb (Leonardo Dicaprio) and his partner Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are experts dream thieves, but when a scheme to steal plans from a Mr. Saito (Ken Watanabe) goes awry, they agree to try to plant an idea into the heir to an energy conglomerate’s mind – a process called Inception. They recruit a talented young architect named Ariadne (Ellen Page) to build their dream worlds, and thus set up some brilliant exposition scenes that establish the rules of the universe while showing off some spectacular visuals. Then they descend through several layers of dreams, lots of stuff goes wrong, and we get lots of action and suspenseful intercutting between the different layers.

The rules can be a bit contrived. A major aspect of the film is that you can get lost in the dream if you fail to time your awakening correctly. This adds some tension and ambiguity to a situation where no one can really die, but it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense (I don’t see how you can dream forever if you’re asleep for a finite amount of time…no matter the time dilation). I don’t care. The movie has its rules, and it sticks to them, and it’s better than the old “if you die in a dream you die in real life" canard.

It also establishes the existential dilemma that hangs out in the background (and *spoiler* comes to the fore in the final shot). At any moment, the film can pull the rug out and declare a scene a dream, but it does this sparingly, while leaving the question open to a large extent. I know this annoyed some people, but I liked this aspect of the film, and I don’t care that much one way or another. Applying one interpretation or another makes this a whole different film. It’s an interactive experience!

For the record, I tend to prefer to think that the whole thing is a dream. The fact that the “awake” world is full of shadowy corporations, mazelike cities, happy shiny children, and people with no surnames and/or names as on the nose as Ariadne, all screams dream to me. Plus, he’s using the wrong damn totem the whole movie! But, I’ve heard convincing arguments in other directions, so I don’t get too wrapped up in it. I’m also very fond of the interpretation that the entire film is a metaphor for the filmmaking process – all of the members of the heist gang have roles analogous to the film world (Cobb director, Satoshi producer, conman Eames is the actor), and they’re putting together a production to change the way their audience thinks.

I have heard people complain as well that the characters fell flat for them. I’ll admit that it’s a challenge to create relatable characters when they spend so much time explaining the rules of the movie in long scenes of exposition…but I did anyway. I was drawn into the characters. I did care about their fates at the end. Of course, I think Cobb’s dreamed them all, so maybe I hold them to lower standards.

Nolan is one of the most skilled filmmakers working today, and he’s at the height of his powers here. This is a wonderfully constructed film that takes some high-flying effects and concepts and slips them into a heart-pounding actioner. This was my favorite film of 2010, so it’s a no-brainer for the Hugo as far as I’m concerned.

Grade: A

2000 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – GALAXY QUEST

Galaxy Quest follows actors from a fictional Star Trek-like show of the same name that aired in the early 80s for three or four seasons. The actors now make their living touring the con circuit and dealing with obsessive fans. These fans include a group of real aliens, Thermians, who think the old episodes are “historical documents.” They need the crew from Galaxy Quest to save their species from the cruel alien overlord Sarris. Tim Allen plays the Shatneresque Captain, full of swagger and always trying to overshadow his crew. Alan Rickman plays his alien first mate, who, like Nimoy in the ‘70s, wants to be taken seriously and is somewhat ashamed of his role. Sigourney Weaver plays the female officer who never had much to do (her job was to repeat everything the computer says). Sam Rockwell gets some of the biggest laughs as a “red shirt” who died early in an episode. All of them are taken by the Thermians to a complete, thorough recreation of their ship.

I’ll be honest; when I first saw this film, I really didn’t like it. A lot of the satire, especially in the first half, is dead on… But, as the film goes on, it becomes more and more like the material it initially mocks. By the end, it’s much more of a love letter than a satire. It’s a full on space adventure with real action, and real stakes. Back in 1999, I was in my heady, pretentious college days. I was both too good for Trek and really sick of it, and I was in no mood for a corny knock-off, as I saw it.

On this review, I enjoyed it quite a bit. Mostly, I’ve just gotten over myself. The thing is, this film works both as a space opera and as a gentle, fun-poking love letter. In hindsight, it’s one of the best space operas between Star Trek: First Contact in ‘96 and Serenity in ’05. The Fifth Element is the only film during that almost-decade span that I can really say might be better. True, the rest of the qualifying films are horrible Star Trek: The Next Generation films, awful Star Wars prequels (none of which even received a nomination from the Hugo voters, amazingly), and failed Vin Diesel vehicles. After all of those trainwrecks, this film looks a lot more successful. It’s funny, fun, and it has a great cast.

That said, this is a spectacular era for films with speculative elements, and I would’ve been happy with any of this crop of nominees. I already talked about Malkovich and The Matrix. The Sixth Sense is a fine supernatural drama, that holds up despite the steep decline of its creator's reputation. The Iron Giant is a wonderful animated film by Brad Bird, who went on to greater fame with Pixar. I’d probably rank Galaxy Quest fourth or fifth out of that set of films, and it certainly doesn'r have the credentials or influence of The Matrix. But, I do have a much greater appreciation of it now.

I guess you could even argue that this movie continues our “what is reality?” theme in the film reviews of late, as it does rest on a misunderstanding about the nature of fiction in a sf tv show. That's kind of a stretch though.

Grade: B+

No post on Monday, but I'll be back Wednesday.

1999 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1998 Saturn Fantasy – TRUMAN SHOW

What is it with the late ‘90s obsession with questioning reality? First we get Dark City, we have the Matrix coming up, and here we have The Truman Show (not to mention eXistenZ, The Thirteenth Floor, Memento, and Pleasantville) all with the same basic theme - what if the world around you isn’t what it seems? So, what’s up late ‘90s? Things a little bit too easy in the days of the Silicon Valley Boom between the Cold War and Al Qaeda? Did we have to come up with some existential angst to compensate? Or is it something as simple as a generation of Philip K. Dick-reading geeks coming of age?

Peter Weir’s is the brightest and most mainstream of all these films. Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) lives in the artificial world of Seaheaven. All of his friends and family are actors, and every moment of his life is broadcast around the world as a 24-hour cable television show. Truman, unaware of all of this, goes through the motions of his humdrum life until he begins to notice odd things – lighting plummeting from the sky, stage directions broadcast over his radio, and his dead father appearing on the street and then being carried away by extras. As Truman begins to suspect the truth, his life begins to unwind. Meanwhile, the showrunner, Christof (Ed Harris) attempts to block Truman at every turn to keep the show running.

It’s an interesting conceit, and it makes for some funny moments and some nice bits of satire (the film’s best joke is a runner about the cast’s awkward efforts at product placement). It also seems quite timely; this is, after all, the moment when reality shows began to takeover television schedules. It looks great and it’s easy to watch. I do wish it asked some tougher questions though. Everything seems a bit…surfacey. I’d like to know more about how Truman’s sheltered existence has shaped him as a person – he seems to have the same hopes and dreams as anyone else would, despite living in a bottle. I’d also like to know more about the actors on the show, who give up their own lives and identities to maintain the illusion (Truman’s wife, played by Laura Linney in my favorite performance of the film, supposedly sleeps with him, despite not really liking him in real life). I’d also like more insight into the audience – we see lots of heartwarming cutaways of them rooting for his escape, but Weir seems to ignore the fact that few of them actively protest his captivity, and they even enable it by obsessively watching his show and boosting the ratings. In other words, the film offers all sorts of great opportunities for insight or satire, but manages to ignore almost all of them.

The one area where Weir really does seem to want to push a metaphor is religion. Christof has something of a God complex, and Truman is the victim of his divine whims who finally rebels. But even this metaphor is a tad heavy-handed, and I can’t entirely say what it means in the end. Still, it’s a nicely made film that only fails in the sense that it could have been so much more. I’d rather watch a film that fails to meet the promise of an ambitious project than a Men in Black-style going through the motions, which is exactly how I’d describe fellow nominee Star Trek: Insurrection. Of the other nominees, I’d say I prefer Dark City, and I like Pleasantville even better (again, lots of similarities there), but I’m not upset that this film won.

Grade: B+

1998 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – CONTACT

Contact has such a fine pedigree, that it was pretty much inevitable it would win this award. Based on a novel written by the great scientist/writer/first-contact-enthusiast Carl Sagan, the film was directed by Spielberg-protégé and Back to the Future co-creator Robert Zemeckis. It’s a first contact story, but one that focuses on science and (by Hollywood standards) plausibility.

Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster) developed a love of astronomy and a curiosity about the existence of extra-terrestrial life from her caring father, who died while she was still a young girl. As an adult, she sacrifices her career to this obsession and spends much of time listening to the noise from radio-telescopes at the Very Large Array in New Mexico. She’s generally derided, though New Agey Christian guru Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey, at the point in his film career when we were still supposed to take him somewhat seriosuly) has a thing for her. On the verge of losing her funding, she hears a signal from the star Vega. The signal is full of information, including the plans to build a mysterious machine. James Woods, as Evil Government Man, and Tom Skerritt, as Evil Competitive Sell-Out Former-Teacher Man, try to co-opt the project to forward their own careers, but Ellie manages to hang on, thanks in part to the most ridiculous part of the film, the patronage of an extremely mysterious super-rich super-genius named Hadden. Jake Busey plays a Busey, i.e. a madman who screams incoherent nonsense. Ellie eventually gets to use the machine, and….maybe….communicate with the aliens.

It’s a very well-made and well-acted film, and despite some Hollywood-style melodrama, it manages to feel more grounded and relevant than most sf films. The second act drags a bit, but it’s pretty compelling nonetheless. Most importantly, Sagan, Zemeckis et al manage to make this a film about science, and they convey the stimulations, challenges, and overall excitement of scientific discovery. I’m a strong believer in the idea that the world needs more positive depictions of science as a method and as an occupation.

The real theme of the film is science versus faith, and I think the movie manages to pull it off while still doing justice to each side. The theme plays out through a debate between Ellie and Palmer, and both characters manage to present their case and see the other’s point of view without really compromising their firmly held beliefs. It’s a difficult balance to strike, but this movie manages to navigate it nonetheless.

Solid script, solid acting, solid directing, clear themes...throw in some good special effects, and you have a film that really is Hugo-worthy….though 1997 was a great year for sf films. I obviously liked this better than Men in Black. Starship Troopers is a truly stupid movie that many people enjoy; I didn’t like it at the time, but maybe I need to rewatch it to see if there really is some great satire that I missed. The Fifth Element is as different from Contact as you can get, but I think it’s fun and interesting. Gattaca is the real under-appreciated gem of this year; it would have gotten my vote over Contact. I can’t complain though.

Grade: B+

2011 Hugo nomination announcements this weekend (finally).

My guesses are here.

1997 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – “Severed Dreams,” BABYLON 5

Back to B5 with its second, and final, Hugo win. I chronicled my B5 watching history last time: there’s no question that the long, intricately planned arcs are ground-breaking and influential. However, horrible production values marred the series’ first season. By season 3, the production values have improved quite a bit. It seems to be in the same range as a show like early Buffy (whose production values I have no problem ignoring). However, even in season 3, at the show’s creative peak, I’m still not entirely won over by the characters and plot.

In the last Hugo-winning episode, Babylon 5’s quest for peace was collapsing as the evil “Shadows” manipulated alien races into attacking each other. These problems continue, but the newest threat is from within. An alliance of Alfred Bester-inspired psi-cops, the Shadows, and an evil President have taken over Earth and declared martial law. Under Commander John Sheridan, Babylon 5 breaks with the new Earth government and becomes a beacon of resistance. A lot of fighting ensues, and the production team really does pull out all the stops to make the battles look relatively decent…and even better.

I’m still not entirely sold on this series though. I wish I knew more about the Shadows. I wish everything wasn’t framed as a titanic struggle between pure good and pure evil. I wish the characters weren’t cookie-cutter clichés. I wish JMS could dial back his love of melodrama and preaching from the soap box. I wish a lot of things. There’s so much to admire about this series, but there continue to be a lot of little things that bother me. I doubt I’ll be a convert in the end, but I really do appreciate the layered, continuity-heavy storytelling that the show represents.

Unlike last time, I don’t think this episode was up against extremely strong competition. DS9’s “Trials and Tribble-ations” was a fun, nostalgic romp, but it was also very gimmicky. First Contact is also fun but flawed – more in the JJ Abrams school of Trek movies than the Nicholas Meyer school. If I were to pick an alternate winner, it might be a previous B5 episode called “Messages from Earth,” wherein we learn that the evil Earth government has found Shadow ships on Mars and Ganymede. It’s got a great archaeological mystery and an action sequence that may not be as elaborate as this episode’s but is more exciting (and less inevitably headed toward dues ex machine).

Grade: B

1996 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – “The Coming of Shadows,” Babylon 5

My teenage sf-nerdom didn’t really tail off until ’97, so it’s a bit of a surprise that I didn’t give more attention to this critical darling of sf fandom. To this day, there’s a fairly significant group who consider this the best science fiction show of all time. Back in the day, I watched the tv movie and the pilot, and maybe one or two other episodes…and I really didn’t enjoy what I saw. Now, I’m working my way through the whole series (thanks Netflix Instant Viewing!) and I can see exactly why I didn’t like it. However, just maybe, with this episode, I’m starting to see why it’s so beloved.

The overall series takes place in a space opera setting dominated by races which are often at each others’ throats. The plume-haired Centauri are the old colonial overlords of the spot-headed Narn, and humans have recently fought a long, losing war with the mystical bald-headed Minbari. And then there are the mysterious Vorlons, whom few have ever seen because they wear bulky atmosphere suits. In an attempt to establish galactic peace, these five races have created a sort of League of Nations dispute-resolving body that meets on a human-controlled space station called Babylon 5. However, this Alliance is highly controversial, and the first four Babylon stations came to bad ends.

The show is the brainchild of J. Michael Straczynski , who wrote an overwhelming number of the series’ episodes himself and came in with a detailed plan of its overall arcs. The heavy foreshadowing and intricate maneuvers that JMS’s plan made possible are what really sets the show apart from others. “The Coming of Shadows,” an episode from the second season, is one of several turning points that progresses the multi-season arc in some major ways. A mysterious force known as the Shadows has been manipulating some of the characters since season one, and here it provokes an all out war between two Alliance members – the Narn and the Centauri – as the Centauri emperor dies. In a sub-plot, B5’s former Commander (from season one) sends a message that he is preparing a resistance to fight in the dark times that are to come. The fact that the show would change its lead for the second season (Bruce Boxleitner comes in and does a decent job) is another example of its boldness.

In other words, it’s an episode that plays to the show’s two biggest strengths – intricate long-term plotting and the aliens’ diplomatic intrigues. At a time when serialized television was virtually non-existent, Babylon 5 rewarded careful viewing in ways that influenced Buffy, Lost and the Battlestar reboot. The second season also shows some significant improvement on the show’s weakness – those problems that kept me from watching it when I was in high school. Frankly, the production values in the first season are terrible, even for a low-budget syndicated show. The show was one of the first to eschew model effects in favor of cgi, which doesn’t look much better than some of the stuff kids younger than me were doing on their home PCs around the same time.* The make-up is okay (you can tell from my description of the aliens that it’s fairly simple). Worst of all are the acting, directing, and editing – you don’t really appreciate how well these things are typically done on television until you see them done really badly, as on the first season of B5. We come into shots too early, the camera-work can be lazy, and the actors are so wooden that it can be painful to watch. Things do get much better in the second season, but problems still abound. So, the question is: is an intriguing sf story worth wading through a terrible production? I guess I’ll check back on how I feel about that when we cover a season three episode for the next Dramatic Presentation Hugo…

I feel like I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in here somewhere. The show ran concurrently with Babylon 5, and shares a lot of the same themes: set on a space station, war with a shadowy alien force, focus on long-term alien diplomacy with religious overtones, and a whole host of smaller similarities. JMS had pitched his space opera to Paramount, so it’s certainly possible that something sketchy happened here. There’s enough circumstantial evidence to arouse suspicions. On the other hand, JMS’s indebtedness to Star Trek is very clear, and B5 is really a synthesis of ideas from the first two Trek tv series anyway. And, the shows are very different once you get past some of the basics. DS9 has far better production values and much more interesting characters, and for my money, it’s the best sf show tv has ever seen. It didn’t win any Hugos and was beaten head-on by B5 twice. DS9’s “The Visitor” is much better than “The Coming of Shadows,” in my view, as is Twelve Monkeys, but I won’t deny that Babylon 5 is beginning to look like a show deserving of Hugo recognition. Maybe I’ll take an opportunity to talk about DS9 in depth down the road sometime.

*to be fair, some of these kids work at Pixar and Disney now.

Grade: B+

1995 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION: “All Good Things…”

Ron Moore and Brannon Braga wrote this final episode of The Next Generation. They had become fairly integral to the show by this point, and I think their aesthetics added a lot to the show – it became less episodic, more serious and just a tinge darker under their watch.

Like, “Inner Light,” this is a fine example of what Star Trek: The Next Generation does well, and, again, it focuses on Patrick Stewart, by far the show’s strongest actor and biggest presence. It’s also an amazing model for how to do a series’ finale: it looks back to the show’s beginning and looks forward to see where the characters might go without losing sight of the present. The godlike entity Q (John DeLance) causes Picard to skip back and forth, Slaughterhouse-Five-style, through three periods in time – the show’s present, seven years earlier when the Enterpise-D launched (the show’s pilot episode, “Encounter at Farpoint,” which was nominated for a Hugo), and twenty-five years into the future. In all three time periods, Picard must investigate a cosmic MacGuffin – these leads to doubts from his fledgling crew in the past, and, in the future, Picard has to “get the band back together” while his old crew suspects that he is suffering the effects of a degenerative brain disease. The MacGuffin is rather pointless and nonsensical, but the writing and acting are excellent, and it’s a brilliant way to send off the show.

Star Trek has yet to pick up another Hugo, though there is some good material out there after this – at some point maybe I’ll take an opportunity to say a bit more about DS9. There’s also a lot of really bad Trek after this as well, including a few awful Next Generation films, including Generations, written by the same Braga-Moore team and filming almost immediately after this episode. You can’t win them all.

I wonder how many more Hugos TNG would have won if they had separated the dramatic presentation categories as they do now. There wasn’t much competition; I think The Next Generation prompted a lot of the sf shows that appeared in the 90s. These two Picard episodes are very deserving, especially “The Inner Light,” but it would have been nice for some of the Klingon episodes to get more attention – the show builds a fairly rich culture for these aliens that were just swarthy moustache-twirlers in the Original Series. “Sins of the Father” and “Reunion” are very good. The alternate timeline action episode “Yesterday’s Enterprise” is also worthy of attention, as are some of the Asimovian robot stories about Data, like “Measure of a Man.” Then there’s the more action-oriented battle with the Borg in “Best of Both Worlds.” I’m sure the show was bad as often as it was great, but those great episodes really are some of the finest science fiction television of all time.

Grade: A-

1994 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation, 1993 Saturn – JURASSIC PARK

Michael Crichton had an unhealthy obsession with amusement parks that tried to kill their patrons. Between his Jurassic Park franchise and his Westworld franchise, I can only assume that he had a very bad experience at Disneyland at some point in his life.

The titular park is filled with dinosaurs cloned from DNA discovered in prehistoric mosquitos fossilized in amber. It’s not all that far-fetched, other than the problem that we have no mosquito fossils from nearly that long ago. We do have a fair amount of mammoth DNA though, and scientists have speculated about developing clones and using elephants as surrogates. The film "Late Pleistocene Park" probably wouldn’t have grossed 900 bijillion dollars like this one though. The filmmakers also cheated by making their velociraptors twice as large as they really were, but paleontologists fixed that problem by discovering the larger utahraptors around the time of the film’s release.

Anyway, the plot: billionaire John Hammond brings in a group of scientists, a lawyer, and his grandchildren to examine the dinosaur-filled park that he’s building, but everything goes wrong and the dinosaurs run wild. It’s a fun romp, but the big attraction at the time was the dinosaurs themselves, which look a sight better than the first on-screen live action dinosaurs in 1925’s The Lost World. Between T2 and this film, we’re clearly in the midst of a cgi revolution, and I certainly remember feeling that at the time. Jurassic Park is far more ambitious as it attempts to use computer effects to create realistic living, moving creatures rather than silvery goo. As a result, the effects have not aged nearly as well. The running T-Rex and raptors still look pretty good, but the static shots that first reveal the prehistoric animals – which I remembered as awe-inspiring – look a bit like what you’d see in a cable documentary these days.

Nevertheless, I still enjoyed re-watching the film quite a bit. Overall, it’s aged better than I’d expected. I think there are two secrets to this success. The first in Spielberg’s direction – he’s at the peak of his abilities (Schindler’s List was released in the same year, believe it or not), and his talents for suspense and action show through. I also like Spielberg’s signature “smoky light beam” effect a lot more than J. J. Abrams' unhealthy lens-flare addiction. The performances also keep the film interesting – Spielberg has a talent for eliciting not-annoying performances from child actors and Sam Neill and Laura Dern are solid as the heroic paleontologists. Meanwhile, Sir Richard Attenborough and Jeff Goldblum chew through the scenery as an eccentric billionaire and rockstar chaos mathematician, respectively. Even Samuel L. Jackson, in a minor role, keeps things lively. Everyone involved from the director to the actors to the effects people walk the line between serious suspense and pulp romp, and they’ve created a memorable classic in the process.

Don’t worry though, Spielberg proved in Jurassic Park II: The Lost World that he’s fully capable of making horrible films as well!

Grade: B+

1993 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation – STAR TREK: THE NEXT GENERATION, “The Inner Light”

No Hugos for Star Trek for over two decades, and then two in three years (and a Saturn). Yep, the early nineties is a real Renaissance for the Trek franchise, and The Next Generation is at the heart of it.

The Next Generation picks up about a century after the original series (so, it should’ve been called “Star Trek: Four or Five Generations Later”) and follows a new Enterprise (version “D”) with a more rationalist and diplomatic Captain than Kirk named Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart). There’s also a robot, an empath, a blind engineer, and a Klingon security officer. It’s a nice cast of characters, and it’s much more of an ensemble series than the original. Or, most of the time. Patrick Stewart is the star of the show, however, and he can usually act circles around everyone else on set. As a result, the series really hinges on Picard.

In fact, I’d say the first two seasons suffer by not highlighting Stewart enough. The Hugo voters nominated the pilot and then promptly ignored the show for four years. It’s not too surprising considering the show’s obvious growing pains. This episode, from near the end of the series’ fifth season, is all about Patrick Stewart. Beware, I’m going to spoil this one, though I think it’s fairly obvious where it’s all going.

The Enterprise investigates a strange probe, which promptly puts Picard into a coma. He awakes on an alien world, where everyone insists that he is a man named Kamin, and that he is married. At first, he resists their claims and tries to figure out how to get back to his ship, but years pass, and he settles down. He starts a family with his wife, teaches his daughter science, becomes an upstanding member of the community, and learns to play the flute. He becomes an old man, and his astronomical observations lead him to realize that their planet is dying. Then he wakes up and discovers that whole life had been implanted in his mind as a monument to a dead civilization. What was decades of life for him was mere minutes for the rest of Enterprise crew.

It’s a great science fiction concept that creates a really touching scenario. It’s a quiet episode with no action sequences or alien baddies (take that Abrams!). It’s just scenes from a random guy’s life, but it’s about family, loss, and mortality, and it’s entirely carried by Stewart’s performance, which is amazing. In my opinion, this is Star Trek’s finest hour.

Grade: A

1992 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation and 1991 Saturn – TERMINATOR 2

The second (and FINAL!) Terminator film is another one of those sequels that’s better than it has any right to be. The scenario of the first film is pretty self-contained: woman runs from killer robot and survives. Sending another killer robot risks repeating the whole thing. Doing it with a huge budget and new special effects techniques threatens to bog the film down in mindless spectacle. Part of the charm of the first Terminator is that it’s a small budget, extended chase. It’s taut and intimate like a good horror flick. T2 threatens to be bloated and unnecessary, but, instead, Cameron manages to build on the mythology he created in the first movie.

John Connor is now a young, troubled teenager. In the future, Skynet decides to make a second attempt at destroying him with a more advanced Terminator – the liquid metal T1000 (Robert Patrick). This time, future Connor sends back a reprogrammed Terminator to protect him (Schwarzenegger). You could cynically see this as future politician Schwarzenegger redeeming his most villainous role, but the character’s conversion does make for some fun moments, especially in his interactions with Connor. The T1000 exists mainly to provide cgi shots; at the time they were so revolutionary, and thus so expensive, that this film infamously destroyed Orion Studios financially. In less than a decade, people could do the same thing on home pcs.

However, the film’s real genius comes through the journey that it takes Sarah Connor on (Linda Hamilton reprises her role). The directionless waitress of the first film has become dedicated to training her son for the apocalypse. She’s tough, well-trained, and ruthless, but she also spends most of her time contemplating fate. She knows that the world will explode in a few years, and she’ll do anything to prepare for it…or maybe stop it. I think Connor might be Cameron’s greatest achievement as a filmmaker. Sure, he’s made a few billion dollar films and revolutionized special effects filmmaking two or three times, but Connor is the kind of vivid and complicated, tough female character that I’d really like to see a lot more of.

If I had a complaint, it might be about the film’s casual violence. There are actually jokes made about assaulting and shooting innocent people (e.g., “He’ll live.”) It actually doesn’t bother me all that much, though I do have the nagging feeling that it should.

So, the effects were great, and they still look good, even if they should not have cost quite so much. There are several fantastic action set-pieces, interesting characters, and a further exploration of time travel/destiny. I’m solidly in the camp that this is a far better film than its predecessor, although I know a lot of people who are in the other camp.

And they never made anything else in the Terminator franchise….

Grade: A

1991 Hugo for Dramatic Presentation and Saturn Fantasy – EDWARD SCISSORHANDS

Tim Burton’s take on the Frankenstein story (well, one of his takes on it) is a metaphor for loneliness, a satire of the American suburbs, an oddball love story, and visually astonishing. Avon lady Peg Boggs (Dianne West) finds a pale man named Edward (Johnny Depp) in a strange black leather costume wandering around the grounds of an abandoned mansion during a sales call. He seems shell-shocked, and he has a grotesque set of scissors in place of hands. He does seem to be quite good at hedge-clipping though.

Peg takes him home. The neighbors begin to gossip, and their opinions of Edward turn dramatically throughout the movie as a suburban mob-mentality takes hold (which makes for some hilarious hedge-clipping and hair-dressing montages). When Peg’s angsty daughter Kim (Winona Ryder) shows up, she grows close to Edward, but must deal with his literal and metaphorical barriers to intimacy.

Depp’s performance is excellent, as are those over-the-top suburbanites. The real star is the art direction. Burton’s films always have a distinctive visual look, but I don’t think it ever works as well as in the clash of light and dark, suburban and gothic, that we see here. Danny Elfman's score ain't bad either, for that matter. This is a wonderful film, and I’m quite pleased that the Hugo voters chose it over the bombastic Governator-starring, ersatz Dick-adaptation Total Recall (even though I liked that movie too).

Grade: A-