Hugo Cinema Goes Mainstream (Hugo Cinema 1982)

This blog post is the twenty fifth in a series examining past winners of the Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo Award. An introductory blog post is here.

Science fiction cinema of the 1980s holds a special place in the hearts of many fans … perhaps because so many of them fell in love with the genre during a decade in which the genre entered the mainstream.

Kurt Russell as Snake Plissken in Escape From
New York. The movie somehow didn't earn
a Hugo Award nomination.
(Image via IMDB)

During that decade, Hollywood studios watched the stratospheric box office revenue being generated by movies such as Halloween, Alien, and of course Star Wars … and wanted to get in on the action. Suddenly, studios were willing to finance up-and-coming talent, and took the chance to take swings at genre, hoping to strike gold.

This influx of new SFF cinema allowed bold ideas to be rewarded at the box office, and in time get the critical praise that it was missing at the time of release.

The Hugos of 1982 marked an inflection point in the evolution of cinema. The previous year, the Hugos celebrated the likes of Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, old serials like Flash Gordon, and the hard science fiction of Carl Sagan. Now, a new guard was taking centre stage, as fresh new ideas shook up the industry.

There’s also a shift in the coverage that these films would receive in contemporaneous fanzines. While discussions of science fiction movies were once relegated to the occasional dismissive rant on the letters page, many fanzines now engaged seriously with cinema. In particular, Jim Harris’ Science Fiction Review regularly provided pages of reviews.

This sea change was most evident in some of the movies that did not end up on the ballot. Our cinema club had universal praise for John Carpenter’s Escape from New York.. Like a lot of Carpenter’s work, it’s a masterclass in effective use of resources; star Kurt Russel served as costume director, while Carpenter himself wrote the score. Protagonist Snake Plissken may not be the first antihero in genre cinema, but he is among the most memorable.

Another film that does a lot with a little is the low-budget Canadian film Scanners. A hidden psychic war is a neat premise that’s elevated by how director David Cronenberg leaned into the body horror. While it wasn’t to everyone’s taste the animated film “Heavy Metal” also did something unique by showing an adult vision of science fiction using a medium primarily shown to children (something Japan had been doing for years).

There was Clash of the Titans which showed that there was still life left in the Ray Harryhausen extravaganza and Superman 2 was a blockbuster that was denied a nomination for technical reasons.

Clash of the Titans may have been the last great
stop-motion epic.
(Image via IMDB)

There was even more to be impressed with from our cousins in the horror genre. Sam Raimi got his start with Evil Dead, the psychological horror drama Possession with Sam Neill and the Academy Award-winning special effect powerhouse An American Werewolf in London. The film club felt that any of these movies would be worthy of nomination and yet none of them were.

What was nominated was a little more mainstream.

While a lot of the group had fond memories of watching Terry Gilliam’s Time Bandits as children, even its most ardent fans admitted that the script was a little bit more “shaggy” than they had remembered. While it had some charm, the movie played out like a series of disconnected skits flowing awkwardly from time period to time period. The group felt that maybe the script could be a little tighter, and some of us loathed it. 

The movie Outland was somewhat the opposite of Time Bandits. Dream logic and whimsy were replaced with the grunge of a mining town (in space!), with black-and-white morality. It was essentially “High Noon in space” … but that turns out to be a fairly good setup for a movie. A lone sheriff standing up for what’s right for the whole when everyone else is only looking out for themselves. Whether it is 1952 or 2024 that premise will always work with a certain audience and many in the club felt that it worked well here. Sean Connery puts in a remarkably restrained performance that ranks among his all-time best roles, as Marshall William O’Niel. Set on Jupiter’s moon of Io, Outland critiques corporate exploitation of workers in a mining colony. What makes this movie shine are the details: O’Niel’s family turmoil seems like a natural reflection of his dedication to his job. Marion Lazarus (played by Frances Sternhagen) provides an interesting ally to the protagonist. At least one member of our cinema watching group thought this deserved to win.

Sean Connery (left) and Frances Sternhagen
anchor the movie Outland with restrained
performances and a gritty charisma.
(Image via IMDB)

In between these films lies Excalibur, an example of muscular filmmaking at its worst. Retelling the archetypal western fantasy King Arthur through a grim-and-gritty lens, it is essentially a movie about men covered in metal swinging swords, trying to get unobtainable women, and making poor decisions that doom everyone around them. This might have been an interesting movie if it had anything new to say about the legend of Arthur, but sadly it does not. The group was somewhat lukewarm on this film. It is fairly well made and looks great and is replete with British/Irish acting legends but is an enormous let-down after John Boorman’s previous movie.

Conversely, we were surprisingly impressed with Dragonslayer, a Disney live-action sword and sorcery directed by Matthew Robbins. Most of us had never seen it, and the consensus was that it was a lot more enjoyable than it had any right to be. This mix of a sorcerer’s apprentice tale with a quest to defeat evil may not have been fresh or bold, but was the right kind of “likeable” for some members of the group. The dragon effect (made by ILM in their first work for another studio) was surprisingly effective for the era. As Richard E. Geiss wrote in Science Fiction Review: “Who would have thought the Disney studios would ever create such a realistic, honest, quality sword and sorcery film as this?”

This brings us to the gravity-crushing neutron star in the room Raiders of the Lost Ark. Hugo-winners George Lucas and Steven Spielberg teamed up to launch one of the biggest movie trillogies of the 1980s, remixing classic adventure serials of the 1930s to create something fantastic. Much of the movie has aged well -- Harrison Ford is at the height of his magnetic charisma, Spielberg’s visual storytelling prowess makes the action comprehensible and engaging, and cinematographer Douglas Slocombe’s beautiful lighting makes every frame a piece of art. However -- at the risk of being castigated for nerd heresy -- there were some aspects of the movie that simply didn’t hold up. Despite being introduced early in the movie as Indiana Jones’ equal, romantic lead Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen) ends up being kidnapped repeatedly and spends much of the movie haplessly calling for help. The narrative structure may have intentionally aped that of a 1920s cinema serial, but several of those episodic sections simply fell flat (in particular the chase through Cairo). Despite these quibbles, most of our cinema club felt that it was still the best choice to take home the Hugo that year.

Going forward this decade will be remembered as the one where science fiction cinema finally became accepted as mainstream, not to mention cool and profitable. Even today, Hollywood leans on a SFF-adventure template as their tentpole for big releases, planning their annual schedule around their leases. Directors’ visions from this decade will shape cinema for generations to come. From where we sit, it looks like there is no going back.