The Compromise Candidate (Hugo Cinema 1990)

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

The 48th World Science Fiction Convention held in The Hague, Netherlands was the most international Worldcon to date. Fans arrived from 31 countries, flying in from five different continents. The United States still represented the largest number of attendees (1,618 fans from the USA), but as far as we can tell this was the first time that they were not an outright majority at the convention.

The Adventures of Baron Munchausen cost 
almost $50 million to make and earned
only eight million. It's chaotic, and far from 
Terry Gilliam's best work.
(Image via Variety)

There had been a sense in 1990 that the world had changed, and that science fiction was undergoing a dramatic shift in popularity. As August approached, registrants began to wonder whether they would be joined by fans from the former Soviet Union, since the Berlin Wall had fallen and more people would have the freedom to travel within Europe. In the end there were at least 21 fans at the convention from former Soviet republics.

Fans from the Anglosphere greeted the prospect of a more international Worldcon with optimism and positivity. In the lead up to the convention, Forrest J. Ackerman noted that, “this is truly an international gathering,” adding that he hoped to hear people in the hallways speaking Japanese, Russian, Finnish, and Hungarian. New York-based conrunner Neil Belsky, who had helped bring the con to the Netherlands, proclaimed that the convention’s attendees proved that the genre was transcending borders of language or culture. For example, there were discussions at the business meeting about creating a Hugo category for translated works. It’s worth noting that these reactions were markedly different from the xenophobia that had greeted the 1970 Worldcon in Germany, which had prompted a xenophobic backlash that had briefly excluded all non-English-language works from the Hugos.

With this evident uptick in interest from outside the United States, there was speculation that the Hugo ballot might see more works by international authors. But as per usual, category after category was dominated by American authors and fans, and just as predictably there was nobody from the winning movie on-hand to accept the award for best dramatic presentation.

Best Dramatic Presentation offered a smorgasbord of big-budget American Hollywood fare. The two highest-grossing movies of the year, Batman and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade had earned nods. Academy Award Best Picture nominee Field of Dreams was on the ballot, as was James Cameron’s underwater alien movie, The Abyss. Rounding out the list was box office disaster, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen.

It’s a mostly credible shortlist, with few real omissions. We might argue that Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has had a greater cultural impact than a t least one movie on the shortlist. And writing in Critical Wave, Brian Aldiss complained that Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi’s comedy-drama My 20th Century deserved consideration, “especially after it won the Cannes Film Festival award.” Back To The Future 2, The Little Mermaid, and The Navigator all narrowly missed the shortlist. Critically ridiculed, The Final Frontier became the only Star Trek movie featuring the original cast not to earn a Hugo nod.

Terry Gilliam's filmmaking shows clear inspiration
from the work of previous Hugo-finalist Karel Zeman.
(Image via IMDB.)

Overall, we felt like the shortlist provides a fair representation of the year’s science fiction and fantasy cinema. And for perhaps only the second meeting of our cinema club, most members remember seeing many of these films in a theatre. The one movie that many of us felt was not worthy of nomination was Terry Gilliam’s The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. The long-winded movie introduces audiences to an aging fabulist who entertains children by recounting unbelievable exploits such as journeys to the Moon, getting swallowed by a sea monster, and being dragged across war-torn Europe with eccentric companions. Although the movie has moments that work, Gilliam’s self-indulgent flaws as a filmmaker are magnified by the chaos of the plot. Kim Newman of the fanzine Vector dismissed The Adventures of Baron Munchausen as an inconsistent and frustrating movie, and made an apt observation that the work owed an enormous debt to Czech filmmaker Karel Zeman. The gender representation is dreadful, as every woman in the movie is either a goddess, a temptress, or someone to be rescued. One can see the seeds of Gilliam’s more recent political statements in his earlier work.

Almost equally chaotic and stylized — but far more successful — was Tim Burton’s Batman. The highest-grossing movie of the year brought the comic book character to the big screen for the first time in almost 30 years. It succeeded largely on the charisma of its stars, a superb soundtrack, the exuberant production design, and on general vibes. But the plot — involving poisoned beauty products and some kind of city held hostage — is meandering and slightly confusing. However, this didn’t prevent the movie from hitting the cultural zeitgeist at the right moment, and its presence in both fandom and among the broader public was inescapable.

The only old-school science fiction movie on the shortlist this year may have been James Cameron’s The Abyss. Following the crew of an underwater mining operation who encounter alien life in the deepest parts of the ocean, it pits jingoistic militarism against American labourers and scientists. Some themes of the movie have aged well, but the gender politics surrounding the blue-collar protagonist Virgil (Ed Harris) and his ex-wife oceanographer Lindsey (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) are regressive at best. The fact that director James Cameron was in the middle of a divorce while making the movie is fairly evident. Contemporaneous reviews of the movie are unforgiving. David Ansen in Newsweek panned James Cameron’s underwater adventure: “The Abyss is pretty damn silly — a portentous deux ex machina that leaves too many questions unanswered and evokes too many other films.”

Field of Dreams may be the most Baby Boomer-coded
movie ever made, weaving in dozens of signposts
to historical events of particular significance to
those born in the USA between 1945 and 1960, including
a book banning scene in an elementary school.
It’s like someone tried to adapt Billy Joel’s
We Didn’t Start The Fire into a feature-length movie.
(Image via Film89.co.uk)

Based on a novel by Edmontonian W.P. Kinsella, Field of Dreams is an unusual inclusion on the Hugo Award shortlist — and one that was not without controversy. Following a farmer Ray Kinsella (Kevin Costner) who is guided by unseen voices that tell him to build a baseball diamond in his corn field, it’s a saccharine road trip through mystical Americana culminating in the resurrection of famous baseball players. At times, the corniness isn’t contained to the farming. Some contemporaneous fans seemed to think that it was “bereft of internal consistency, not science fiction, not a Hugo movie,” while others argued that the magical realism of the story made it award worthy. In his review, SFF author John Varley wrote, “Who is the voice? Shit, I dunno. I don’t care. There are so many possible interpretations of the impossible events, and the movie makes no attempt to favor any of them.” For all this, the movie remains intensely likeable and charming, though many of our cinema-watching group agreed that it did not belong on the Hugo ballot.

The final movie on the shortlist was the capstone of the Indiana Jones franchise: The Last Crusade. In this third outing for the swashbuckler, Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) teams up with his father Dr. Henry Jones (Sean Connery, best-known for starring in Zardoz) in a quest to retrieve the cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the last supper. What elevates the movie is a combination of chemistry between the two leads, a nice plot twist featuring love interest Elsa Schneider (Alison Doody), and a solid emotional core. Upon revisiting it, many of us felt that the movie has held up better than any other in the Indiana Jones saga; surpassing even the original. “To say that Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade may be the best film ever made for 12 year olds is not a backhanded compliment … more cerebral than the first two Indiana Jones films and less schmaltzy than the second, this literate adventure should make big bucks by entertaining and enlightening kids and adults,” Variety raved.

Interestingly, the 1990 Hugo Award race demonstrated the importance of ranked ballot voting, as Field of Dreams was well in the lead on the first ballot; receiving 110 first-preference votes to only 83 for Indiana Jones. But Field of Dreams was the second-preference movie for very few voters; picking up only one vote on the second ballot, and another 13 on the second ballot. Last Crusade, however, was a second choice for almost everyone, and earned the award as the compromise candidate; the movie that everyone liked, and few people rejected out of hand.

As the decade came to a close, the Hugos recognized probably the best science fiction or fantasy movie of the year, while offering a fairly reasonable short list that represented the preoccupations of fandom. It was overall a good year.