1.21 Gigawatts of Pure Entertainment (Hugo Cinema 1986)

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

If we had a Delorean, a flux capacitor, and 1.21 gigawatts of electricity, we wouldn’t change anything about which movie won the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation.

Back To The Future — which hit cinemas 40 years ago today — was a cultural juggernaut. It was the top-grossing movie of the year, completely blowing away the competition. It made stars out of Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox. It spawned sequels, tie-ins, spin-offs, a Broadway musical and eventually a Lego set.

Singer Huey Lewis (left) and star Michael J. Fox
on the set of Back To The Future. How the heck
did The Power Of Love lose an Academy Award
to a Lionel Ritchie song from White Nights?
(Image via Entertainment Weekly)

Moreover, it’s one heck of a movie.

But a science fiction movie achieving mainstream success does not guarantee a Hugo trophy — only a couple of years previously E.T. The Extra Terrestrial had earned a bazillion inflation-adjusted dollars, but failed to take home a Hugo award.

The Back to the Future script — which was also nominated for an Academy Award — works with clockwork precision that speaks to careful editing. Almost every plot point is expertly foreshadowed, all characters are believably developed, and every joke feels timed to the nanosecond. The viewers in our movie club felt that their time and attention was well spent, and that every frame was relevant to the story.

Some have suggested that modern science fiction cinema started with Star Wars, but we’d like to suggest that due to its tight pacing, quippy dialogue, and breezy writing, Back To The Future might be the first truly modern science fiction movie.

Our one disappointment isn’t about the actual film. Despite scriptwriter Bob Gale being a University of California classmate and acquaintance of Worldcon stalwart Mike Glyer, there was nobody from the Back To The Future team on-hand to accept the Hugo Award at the 44th World Science Fiction Convention in Atlanta.

Although the post-Star Wars boom was starting to fade, it had still been a good but eccentric year for science fiction and fantasy at the cineplexes. The Quiet Earth, hauntingly filmed in New Zealand, provided a tale of a world after people. Martha Coolidge’s Real Genius kept audiences rapt with Cold-War superweapon antics. George Miller made his third — and weirdest — Mad Max movie. George A. Romero cranked up the zombie mayhem in Day of the Dead. And Larry Cohen’s The Stuff remains possibly the greatest film ever made about cursed, evil frozen yogurt.

Certainly the most eccentric and polarizing of all was Terry Gilliam’s Brazil. In the run-off balloting, it had received almost as many first-place votes as Back To The Future, but earned few second-, third-, or fourth-place votes. According to one con report, it had placed below “no award” on the most ballots that year. According to a contemporaneous account from Evelyn C. Leeper, “Almost everyone who didn’t vote for it ranked it last.”

I suspect that every human character in Cocoon
 would have voted for Trump, even Steve Guttenberg.
(Image via IMDB)

As Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times said: “Watching Brazil, the exploding cigar in the face of the future, is like watching the contents of Terry Gilliam's head erupt in public.”

Although it is often compared to a satirical version of George Orwell’s 1984, Terry Gilliam’s Brazil presents a far more politically conservative view of dystopia. This is a world oppressed by regulation and by bureaucracy, rather than a dictator. The rebellious freedom fighters are those who flout labour union contract terms and fix things without paperwork. The movie is visually incredible, and meticulously crafted from every technical perspective, but is laden with a script that careens from one half-baked idea to the next. While some of those in our viewing group still harbour nostalgic fondness for Brazil, it was hard to argue with the decision to recognize Back To The Future ahead of it.

The rest of the shortlist is even more flawed.

Cocoon was popular with the mainstream media. Beloved by the New York Times, praised in the New Yorker, lauded by the Winnipeg Free Press. Somehow, it won the Oscar for best Special Effects ahead of Back To The Future … a decision that makes us suspect that Hugo voters have more discerning tastes than members of the Academy.

Vacillating between saccharine and crass, Cocoon is a cringeworthy wish-fulfillment fantasy about septuagenarians who receive a miraculous dose of alien Viagra. Most of the acting is either listless (Brian Dennehy) or campy (Steve Guttenberg). Don Ameche — who earned an Academy Award for his performance — is just about the only actor giving the movie any gravitas.

While much has been made of the fact that Wilford Brimley was only 49 years old when filming Cocoon, we found it more unbelievable that Ron Howard was only 31 when writing and directing it.

The Chicago Tribune described Louis Gossett Jr.’s
performance as “dressing up like a
toad and giving birth.”
(Image via Rottentomatoes)

Many of our viewing club had a lot of residual fondness for Ladyhawke, Richard Donner’s fantasy about a cursed knight set in 1300s France. Starring science fiction all-stars Matthew Broderick and Rutger Hauer, as well as a very young Michelle Pfeiffer, it’s the story of a woman who is cursed to turn into a hawk every time the sun is up, while her soulmate turns into a wolf whenever the sun has set. It’s an interesting concept, and one that provides some very good moments, and Rutger Hauer provides a first-rate performance. Unfortunately, the pacing is odd, the plot meanders all over the place, and the villain seems sort of generic. The movie was a lot … less than we had remembered.

The worst film on the shortlist — the only one that certainly didn’t warrant a Hugo nod — was Enemy Mine. Based on a very fine Hugo-winning novella by Barry B. Longyear, the movie follows human fighter pilot Willis (Dennis Quaid) stranded on a wild planet alongside one of humanity’s enemies, a Drac soldier named Jariba (Louis Gossett Jr.). Naturally, the two end up having to cooperate to survive. It’s a bad sign when Battlestar Galactica 1980 not only produced an episode with the exact same plot (“The Return of Starbuck”) five years earlier, but somehow did so with more verve and emotional depth.

Despite being made on a lavish budget by Oscar-nominated director Wolfgang Peterson, Enemy Mine looks incredibly shabby. Janet Maslin of the New York Times described it as costly, awful-looking, and derivative. “Perhaps such things are more fun to read about than they are to watch,” she quipped, noting that the original story had won awards.

Overall, the 1986 Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation is an exemplar for the continued relevance of the awards. This was one of the years in which Worldcon attendees' choices not only reflected the state of science fiction and fantasy cinema at the time, but they honoured what was almost unquestionably the best movie of the year.

Big Worldcon Is Watching (Hugo Cinema 1984)

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

L.A. Con II, the 42nd Worldcon, was the largest World Science Fiction Convention of all time up to that point, with more than 8,000 fans in attendance (to this day, only the 2023 Worldcon in Chengdu, China has eclipsed that number). Science fiction cinema was bigger than ever. The Hugo Awards were bigger than ever. But in 1984, the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation was still considered a second-tier award.

Star Wars producer Lawrence Kasdan
accepted the Hugo Award in person.
(Image via Fanac Fan History)

“We will now proceed with the minor awards: Best Dramatic Presentation,” Toastmaster Robert Bloch quipped as he introduced the nominees: Bradbury adaptation Something Wicked This Way Comes, special effects maestro Douglas Trumbull’s Brainstorm, early hacking movie Wargames, blockbuster Return of the Jedi, and Oscar Best Picture contender The Right Stuff.

It’s an uneven shortlist that reveals both a tension between the populism and the insularity to which the award was often prone. As they had often throughout the history of the award, nominators almost inevitably included the top-grossing science fiction movie of the year on the ballot … and Return of the Jedi’s whopping $250-million haul had almost doubled the revenue of any other movie in 1983. In contrast, voters also platformed lesser works made by favourite creators with deep ties to the Worldcon community.

The weakest movie on the shortlist is Brainstorm, the sophomore (and final) directorial effort by special effects genius Douglas Trumbull. The story of a scientist (played by Christopher Walken) experimenting with methods for recording and interpreting brainwaves. At times a parable about how the military industrial complex coopts new technologies, at times a portrait of obsession as the scientist tries to recapture bits of his past, Brainstorm’s own EEG readings would be scattershot. Although Trumbull is a master of crafting individual images, his ability to weave a coherent narrative is lacking, and the movie never coalesces into something meaningful or engaging.

Something Wicked This Way Comes eked onto the Hugo Award shortlist, earning only seven votes at the nominating stage. Based on a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury, it portrays a small town through the eyes of two children, while a mysterious carnival undermines the lives of the adults around them. It’s mostly a creditable production, though overlong and often errs on the side of whimsy. Of note, the carnival leader Mr. Dark is played by Welsh actor Jonathan Pryce, who imbues the role with a magnetic charm. The main problem with the movie is that it’s overlong; there’s enough here for an excellent half-hour episode of Twilight Zone, but not enough to sustain a two-hour feature. Although Bradbury himself would later list it as one of the best adaptations of his works, we were often left wondering if his works should be adapted at all; he’s a master of evocative language and internal dialogue, which rarely translates well into cinematic formats. 

A young Jonathan Pryce is possibly the best thing
about Something Wicked This Way Comes. 
(Image via IMDB)

Based on the 1979 novel by Tom Wolfe, The Right Stuff is a historical drama-cum-mockumentary that explores the origins of the American space program. Though not technically science fiction, it’s genre-adjacent enough to be considered for the Hugos. The movie leans into the romanticism of the space race, and presents a mostly sanctified and sanitized version of the astronauts and test pilots at the core of the story. It’s a narrative that’s become part of the national mythology, but much like the Tom Wolfe novel it's based on, the movie is overlong and a bit bloated. Most of the first half hour has little impact on the second half of the story. These quibbles aside, it’s an impressive bit of filmmaking and storytelling, and one can see how it almost unseated Star Wars for the Hugo. It’s interesting to note that a remake of The Right Stuff released just four years ago is completely unavailable for viewing on any platform due to streaming service shenanigans. Sadly, until libraries have the statutory right to preserve and openly share these works, this trend will continue.

Hugo voters should be given credit for their foresight in nominating the first mainstream movie about computer hacking, Wargames. Starring Ally Sheedy and Matthew Broderick at the very beginning of their storied careers, it’s a tightly plotted technothriller about a high school student who starts communicating with the Pentagon’s artificial intelligence computer system … and accidentally almost starts a nuclear war. The slow tension build feels natural, the characters have depth — and the gender representation is significantly better than most entries on this list, as Ally Sheedy’s character has agency and motivation. Moreover, the warning about nuclear war and the fallibility of automated systems still resonates today. This prescient movie holds up better today than many of its contemporaries. Of the dozen people who watched this as part of our cinema club, all but one of us would have selected Wargames as the movie most worthy of the Hugo that year.

It would be difficult to argue that Return of the Jedi lives up to the standards set by the previous two movies. Star Wars has always been a franchise steeped in nostalgia, but Return of the Jedi is the first installment that looks to the past of the franchise itself; returning to Tattooine, returning to a Death Star, returning to secret familial bonds as a plot twist. It’s an uneven effort where the parts that work (the heist-sequence to begin the movie, the confrontation in the throne room) really work, but the parts that don’t (the damned Ewoks) are really leaden, leaving some viewers to suspect contempt for the audience. But 1984 was a year when Star Wars fandom was at its height, and there would be no stopping the juggernaut — with 28 nominating votes, it was by far the leader in the nominating stage. The movie’s producer Howard Kazanjian was actually present to accept the Hugo Award — so at least the fan support was appreciated.

Set in New York ten years after socialism's triumph,
Born In Flames argues that no revolution is complete
without feminist emancipation. It's genuinely great.
(Image via NewFest)

Despite the fact that this was a pretty good year for the Hugos, there were still several excellent works omitted that are worth highlighting. Nobuhiko Obayashi’s The Girl Who Leapt Through Time (時をかける少女) might have warranted consideration. Lizzie Borden’s intersectional feminist socialist semi-utopian Born In Flames would have been worth a nomination. It should also be noted that Canadian horror director had two of his greatest movies hit the cinemas in 1983: the Marshall McLuhan-inspired Videodrome, and the Stephen King adaptation The Dead Zone. Any of these would have been better choices than Brainstorm.

Possibly the most influential work of science fiction that year was the television miniseries The Day After. Directed by multiple Hugo-finalist Nicholas Meyer, The Day After chronicles the lead-up to, and immediate aftermath of a limited nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Heavily promoted by ABC television, it was watched by an estimated 100 million Americans when first broadcast. Despite the fact that it soft-pedaled the actual toll of such a conflict, it was grim enough that it helped convince policymakers to begin talks on a nuclear arms limitation treaty. Given the movie’s influence on policymakers and on the population at large, and that academic tomes have been published on its cultural impact, it’s somewhat surprising that The Day After only received three nominating votes. 

The TV series V introduces Dana, the leader of
 a race of lizard people who bring fascism
wrapped in the American flag.
(Image via Washington Post

Another work that has aged remarkably well in many ways is the television mini-series V. Depicting the arrival of alien Visitors, and their subsequent take-over of the world, V would spawn several spin-offs of much lesser quality. The original remains prescient as a metaphor for the creeping tide of fascism and the way fascists wrap themselves in a nation’s myths while owing no allegiance to the broader public. Only two people had the show on their nominating ballots.

In the 1980s, Star Wars reigned supreme, and Hugo Award voters seemed bound to recognize the franchise at almost every opportunity. As a populist award, it’s often tied to the most populist forms of entertainment. It’s a pretty good year for Best Dramatic Presentation, even though looking back, some of us might wish for more.

NOTE: This blog post would not have been possible without the assistance of Mike Glyer and PJ Evans, who were able to provide Hugo nominating statistics that were otherwise unavailable.

The Kaiju Extension Eligibility Society

Godzilla Minus One puts human-scale characters
in the foreground, while the kaiju casts a shadow
over their lives. (Image via IMDB.com)

This spring, almost 70 years after the original hit cinemas, Godzilla Minus One became the first movie in its franchise to win an Academy Award, for best visual effects. By our estimation, this marks the first time since 2006 that an Academy Award-winning SFF movie did not also earn a Hugo nod.

It’s a perplexing omission. Written and directed by Takashi Yamazki, Godzilla Minus One is a compelling and nuanced take on the kaiju cinema subgenre. Using the monster itself as a metaphor for militarism, for cultural trauma, and for guilt, the director has crafted a beautiful allegory about the power of community and rebuilding.

The protagonist, Koichi, is a former kamikaze pilot who is wracked with guilt over his decision to reject a pointless suicide mission at the end of the Second World War, and is haunted by memories of

The team behind Godzilla were
so enthusiastic at the Oscars,
how can you not cheer them on?
(Image via People.com)

an encounter with a massive lizard monster that nobody believes he saw. Trying to rebuild his life in the ruins of bombed-out Tokyo, he finds meaning in caring for Noriko, a woman who has also lost almost everything in the war, and Akiko, an orphaned baby.

Godzilla Minus One is a movie about human characters whose lives are upended by forces beyond their control. Their struggles to rebuild against the horror of their past are exacerbated by an impressively imagined monster. Godzilla's appearances are more genuinely frightening because we were so invested in the lives of the people.

Enhancing this first-rate script is a subtle and thoughtful approach with the special effects, and action scenes that emphasize the terror such a monster could evoke. The train carriage scene might be one of the greatest moments in kaiju history.

During an era in which the Hugo Awards seem to be beginning to embrace an international mandate of a “World” Science Fiction Convention, there had been hopes that Godzilla Minus One

Warner Brothers (the studio run by
everyone's favourite CEO David Zaslav)
 forced Godzilla Minus One out
of the cinemas early, thus
limiting its audience in America.
(Image via Warner Brothers)

might become the first live-action Japanese movie to earn a nomination for the award.

The fact that Godzilla Minus One does not appear on the Hugo Award Ballot likely has to do with the fact that it was released late in the year, hitting cinemas in the United States on November 29, 2023. Although it opened as a wide release, it did not have the marketing budget of a movie like Dune or Spider-Man. And although it was relatively successful in the box office, it was pulled from distribution early because executives at Warner Brothers didn’t want a Japanese kaiju movie competing with the American kaiju movie Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire which opened a few weeks after Godzilla Minus One.

These are circumstances relatively similar to those in 1981 that prompted the adoption of WSFS rules that enable the business meeting to extend the eligibility of a movie. If you’ve not read our blog post on the subject, here’s the relevant clause of the constitution:

3.4.3: In the event that a potential Hugo Award nominee receives extremely limited distribution in the year of its first publication or presentation, its eligibility may be extended for an additional year by a two-thirds (2/3) vote of the intervening Business Meeting of WSFS.

Given that Godzilla Minus One earned a respectable $56 million in North America, and was on more than 2,000 screens (compared to the English-language Godzilla x Kong, which made almost $500 million on 3,900 screens), it’s not exactly a clear-cut case that this movie was unavailable to Hugo nominators. Nevertheless, a compelling argument could be made that it was denied a fair shot at Hugo nod based on the studio shenanigans and the late-in-the-year release.

We’ll be putting forward an eligibility extension motion at this year’s business meeting. We hope you will support it, and consider it for the Hugo Award in 2025.

The Golden Age Of Wes Anderson Is Twelve

Asteroid City may be Anderson’s first unambiguously genre movie, but for many science fiction fans, it feels like he’s always been one of us.

Wes Anderson's aesthetics have often harkened
back to the post-war era — the waning end of
science fiction's "Golden Age."
(Image via IMDB.com)

Between the heightened reality of his cinematic style and his worldbuilding sets (gormengastian hotels and benthic exploration), his movies have always been on the edge of SFF. In addition, it’s easy to believe that Ender Wiggin, young Anakin, and Wesley Crusher would find a peer group among the socially awkward child prodigies who are mainstays in Anderson’s films.

On the surface, Asteroid City offers what fans have come to expect from Anderson; symmetrical framing, deliberate pastel colour palette, deadpan dialogue delivery, and dysfunctional family dynamics at a time of transition. It will no doubt be loved by many, hated by some, and possibly ignored by most Worldcon nominators.

As with his earlier films — such as The Royal Tenenbaums, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Moonrise Kingdom — this latest offering provides a complex blend of quirky characters, played by a cult-like cast of actors (plus Tom Hanks and Margot Robbie) delivering whimsical and pretentious dialogue for a fraction of their regular incomes.

The setting for the story is the annual Asteroid Day stargazing event, which includes the Junior Stargazer convention. Here, five privileged, intellectually gifted teens receive awards for their space-related inventions. These relatively benign inventions become crucial to the success of the story’s plot arc, when an alien visit forces a quarantine that raises tensions.

And it’s the film’s child actors that move the narrative and, some might argue, steal the show.

It’s through the teenage characters that we see the strongest ties to science fiction, (although Tilda Swinton as the socially awkward, workaholic astrophysicist Dr. Hickenlooper also gives that thread a serious pull, with her lifelong commitment to “figuring out the math.”)

In a star-studded cast, Ethan Josh Lee,
Grace Edwards,  Zoe Bernard,
and Aristou Meehan still stand out.
(Image via IMDB.com)

Framed on top of and interspersed throughout the main narrative of the film is a meta-analysis that neurotically overlays the existential angst of the playwright, played by a long-time Anderson favourite Edward Norton. This secondary narrative mirrors the motivations of the Junior Stargazers, and provides reflection on the very human need to speculate about the future and always strive to do better. To do your best and, unfortunately but perhaps most importantly, to steadfastly refuse to accept that it’s ok to stop and feel joy if you’ve achieved something that’s merely good enough. In order to drive this point home, an acting class in the secondary layer of narrative literally chants this mantra at the audience: “You can’t wake up if you don’t fall asleep.”

To be clear, this isn’t a film for everyone. But we do see this same indefatigable quest for aspirational advancement everywhere in science fiction. The energy and motivation to seek something better is a prerequisite for most standard science fiction tropes. And, unsurprisingly, this drive is mirrored again, through the alien. The non-speaking character is a duty-bound bureacrat that travels from beyond our star system to steal, inventory, and return an asteroid. The part is played by Jeff Goldbloom, who is later shown smoking a cigarette backstage in the secondary narrative, muttering defensively about his role.

Famed fanzine editor Peter Graham once famously quipped that “the Golden Age of Science Fiction is 12,” and we might suggest that Wes Anderson shows an understanding of what that means at its core. Asteroid City depicts the childlike sense of wonder that is at the heart of science fiction fandom with respect and affection that could be read as a love letter to the genre.

It may be the best genre movie of 2023.

A Unanimous Gold Mine Of Subtext

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like if Sun Ra and Samuel R. Delany had tried to make The Matrix, the answer is something like Neptune Frost.

Burudian rapper Kaya Free (AKA Bertrand
Ninteretse) gives a compelling nuanced performance
as Matalusa in Neptune Frost. 
(Image via the Facebook Page of Saul Williams) 

A collaboration between alternative hip-hop artist and provocateur Saul Williams and Rwandan artist and playwright Anisia Uzeyman, Neptune Frost is structured in alternating segments between a story following a coltan miner named Matalusa whose brother is killed while mining coltan in an open pit mine, and an intersex runaway named Neptune who flees from an attempted sexual assault. Neither of them fits into the systems at play in the communities they call home, and through this, the viewer is challenged to find parallels between the oppression of gender conformity and the oppression of standard capitalist employment relationships.

The ability of each of these narrative threads to engender empathy hangs on superb performances in these two roles; Matalusa as played by Kaya Free and Neptune who is played alternatingly by Cherylel Isheja and Elvis Ngabo.

Finding each other when they join a revolutionary anti-capitalist hackers collective, Matalusa and Neptune discover that their relationship warps the fabric of reality and may provide the key to freeing society from the grip of a rapacious mining company and an authoritarian regime.

But a simple plot summary does not begin to convey what makes the movie so unusual and compelling. The central characters’ journeys through this imagined future Rwanda and Burundi shimmers between differing states of existence; musical understandings of the world and cinematic explorations. It’s … a lot to work through.

Additionally, given that it’s a multilingual movie whose dialogue is in parts spoken in Kirundi, Swahili, Kinyarwanda, French, and English, and given that some of the subtext depends on puns in the various languages, it is the sort of cinema that takes some generosity, imagination, and effort to parse.

Although the movie can be opaque and obtuse at times, what is clear is the criticism of capitalism, of colonialism, and of exploitation. This is a movie about an anarchist, anticolonial rejection of heterodox narrative conventions.

This carries through to the exuberant and kaleidoscopic visuals that are elevated by found-item and repurposed set construction. This world is built of broken, discarded, and recycled computers and technology, evoking a punk aesthetic; handmade yet high tech.

Creators Saul Williams and 
Anisia Uzeyman. 
(Image via Facebook)

Although it opened at the Cannes Film Festival in 2021, it’s eligibility for the Hugo Awards was extended at the 2022 WSFS business meeting, so it can be nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation in 2023. And it deserves your attention. 

Although the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation has a long history of celebrating works that are already successful, several nominations in other categories show that Hugo voters are interested in works that represent cultural perspectives other than North American.

In an era when mainstream science fiction movies have embraced safe and comforting fare, experiencing cinema that dares to offer non-traditional narrative structures is refreshing.

Currently available for purchase on various streaming services (YouTube, Apple+, GooglePlay), this challenging, multilayered, perplexing, beautiful beat poem of a movie is probably the most interesting piece of science fiction cinema to have arrived from Africa since the 2009 release of Wanuri Kahiu’s Pumzi.

To quote Neptune Frost itself: this is a Unanimous Gold Mine.

Clash of the Cinema Titans (1972)

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

The early 1970s saw a flourishing of SFF cinema. In 1971 alone, Jim McBride’s X-rated Glen and Randa scandalized audiences with post-apocalyptic sex scenes, and garnered critical love along the way. Boris Sagal threw Charleton Heston to the vampires in the blockbuster The Omega Man. And Josef Pinkava offered audiences a whimsical tale of children with a magical computer in The Wishing Machine. But these films were up against long odds to make the Hugo shortlist. 

The shortlist in 1972 may have provided the most star-studded Best Dramatic Presentation ballot the awards have ever seen. 

The movies on that shortlist were directed by a cavalcade of what are now household names for many: George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Robert Wise, and Stanley Kubrick. Between these four people, there’s a total of 46 Academy Award nominations and $23 billion in box office receipts.

Long before they were beloved by millions of 
moviegoers, science fiction fandom embraced
the works of Steven Spielberg and George Lucas.
The Hugos gave each of them their first award nods
for feature films.
(Image via Reddit)

Each of these directors moved the art of moviemaking forwards and made extraordinary contributions to science fiction cinema … but to be blunt, none of them produced their best work in 1971.

Despite the Hugo ceremony taking place in downtown Los Angeles, none of the finalists made an appearance at the awards. In fact, none of them even bothered to send someone to pick up the award, with local fan Bill Warren acting as the acceptor.

Four movies made the ballot — and a second Firesign Theatre album. Only Bozos On This Bus loosely continues the story started in the previous year’s comedy album, which may make it the first instance in which a work and its sequel were both shortlisted for a Hugo. It probably would have been near the bottom of most of our ballots though. 

More interestingly, an little-remembered television movie L.A. 2017 did make the ballot.

Just 24 years old at the time, Steven Spielberg was taking short-term television gigs while trying to break into feature film work. He’d had a rocky start with poorly-received work on Rod Sterling’s Night Gallery and on Marcus Welby, M.D., when he had the opportunity to direct a one-off science fiction TV movie for an anthology show about journalists in Los Angeles. The result, L.A. 2017, is a surprising inclusion on the Hugo ballot.

Shot for a paltry $375,000, and with a script by Philip Wylie (author of When Worlds Collide and

The real Los Angeles of 2017 turned out to be far
more dystopian than even Steven Spielberg had
imagined in his first feature-length movie L.A. 2017.
(Image via IndieWire)

Gladiator), L.A. 2017 is an uneven work at best. The parable about a fascist future United States living underground to hide from pollution is heavy handed, most of the acting is hammy, and the ending is an appalling cop out. But having watched a number of other television movies of the time during our voyage through Hugo history, we were struck at how much livelier the directing was. It’s clear that Spielberg was head and shoulders above most of his peers directing television in the early 1970s, conveying more through effective framing and camera movement.

Although not well remembered, L.A. 2017 is of significant historical value as it opened doors for the young Spielberg. It’s also interesting to note that this nomination means that the Hugo Awards can boast of being the first major award to have shortlisted Stephen Spielberg.

Just two years older than Spielberg, George Lucas was somewhat more established in Hollywood. Fresh off filming the disastrous Altamont Music Festival for the Maysles brothers’ documentary Gimme Shelter, Lucas was given his first chance to direct a feature film through a partnership with more-established filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola.

Intended to launch a new studio, THX-1138 was shot on a modest budget of slightly under $1 million — by comparison Marooned, which was released little more than a year earlier, had cost ten times that amount. Lucas does an extraordinary amount on that small budget, creating a world that is evocative, cold, and sterile to tell a story about rebellion and a search for emotional connection.

Although this may be one of George Lucas’ most visually compelling movies, the plot (which is essentially an unacknowledged adaptation of Brave New World) is mostly unengaging. The coldness of the setting leaks into the dialogue, leaving little for an audience to engage with.

Shockingly, the guy who would go on to write 
screenplays for The Radioland Murders and
Strange Magic wrote some clunky dialogue
in the movie THX-1138.
(Image via Lucasfilm)

Interestingly, the Hugo nomination for THX-1138 was also George Lucas’ first major award nomination for a feature film (a short version of the film had received a nod at the Oberhausen Short Film Festival in 1968.)

In 1972, Robert Wise was a Hollywood icon at the height of his career. He’d won Oscars for Best Director and Best Picture twice (1961 West Side Story, 1965 Sound of Music). After Universal had won the bidding war over Michael Crichton’s breakout novel The Andromeda Strain, Wise was brought onboard to bring a sense of respectability to a script that might otherwise have been seen as another cookie-cutter disaster movie. Andromeda Strain covers a four-day period after a pathogen arrives from space, and concerns itself with the scientific team attempting to contain the disease.

While it may not deliver high-octane thrills, or incisive social commentary, it’s one of the best depictions of science or scientists that science fiction cinema had seen up to this point. Notably, it's refreshing to see the inclusion of central protagonist Dr. Ruth Leavitt, a caustic, competent, and down-to-earth scientist. Her character — and the lack of objectification — makes Andromeda Strain one of the least sexist SFF movies up to this point.

That depiction stands in stark contrast to the over-the-top misogyny of A Clockwork Orange, Stanley Kubrick’s stylish, beguiling, and deeply unpleasant Hugo winner. Set in a near-future England that has slid into fascism, the movie follows a young man named Alex, his friend group, and their experiences with the police and prisons.

Documentary footage of our cinema club reacting
to 1960 Hugo-finalist Men Into Space.
(Image via FilmLoverss)

Based on a novel by Anthony Burgess, the movie seems to suggest that the sexual revolution will only provide ways for men to aggressively dominate women’s bodies. Debates have raged over the past five decades over whether Clockwork Orange is a commentary on misogyny, or simply misogynistic in and of itself.

Though Kubrik won his third Hugo Award as a director (a feat only equalled by three other directors), it’s difficult to suggest that the voters got this one right. Clockwork Orange is certainly a classic of cinema, and the actual filmmaking, editing, and camera work are all meticulous. But it’s barely science fictional, and many (including about half our cinema club) find it offensive.

It’s not made by as famous a director, but perhaps the more meat-and-potatoes populist option of The Omega Man might have been a more suitable choice to honour with a Hugo in 1972?

Possibly The Worst Year In Sci-Fi Cinema

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

The 1971 Best Dramatic Presentation Hugo ballot was filled to the brim with mediocrity. Despite having the benefit of hindsight and an internet to help us learn about films eligible in that year, our cinema club couldn’t have produced a better list of nominees.

Despite Joan Crawford's performance, Trog is not
up to the standards we might look for in a Hugo finalist.
(Image via IMDB)

We scoured the internet for other options. Doomwatch was influential, but an absolute bore. Skullduggery was a hit, but beyond risible. David Cronenberg’s first movie Crimes of the Future shows promise, but is still the unfinished vision of a young creator. Fans had slim pickings when nominating that year — which may in part explain some of the more … unorthodox choices they made.

It was the first year that audio recordings made it on the ballot, and as much as we are fans of being format agnostic, we wish that the distinction of being the first comedy album to get a Hugo nod had gone to a more worthy entry than Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers.

Expressing a sentiment that was common at the time, John Baxter wrote: “Written SF is usually radical in politics and philosophy; SF cinema, like the comic strips, endorses the political and moral climate of its day.” While we’d suggest that Baxter was a little too generous towards prose SF, having watched and listened to the 1971 shortlist, it’s clear that there’s some merit in his indictment of screen offerings.

The shortlist was an eclectic one in some ways. It had one theatrically released American movie (Colossus: The Forbin Project), one television movie (Hauser’s Memory), one British movie (No Blade of Grass) one spoken-word comedy album (Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers) and one prog rock concept album (Blows Against the Empire).

While this relative diversity of formats could be praised for a willingness to consider various forms of storytelling, to our eyes it looks like Hugo voters were scraping the bottom of the barrel. Writing in Science Fiction Review, Fred Patten suggested that the entire shortlist “is not worthy of consideration.”

Paul Kantner's Blows Against the Empire has
a relatively simple premise that hasn't aged well.
(Image via Futurama)

Blows Against the Empire, recorded by Paul Kantner and some of his Jefferson Airplane bandmates, loosely tells the story of a bunch of San Francisco hippies who steal a starship to go off into space and create a new, better civilization on another planet. The story also seems to focus on a baby that Paul Kanter was having with Grace Slick. To be perfectly blunt, the storytelling offers the height of self-indulgent self-aggrandizement that reflects the worst artistic impulses of the Altamont generation. The majority of the songs contribute nothing to the narrative, and although music may appeal to some listeners, as a piece of science fiction it is dreadful.

Ever so slightly less perplexing a choice for a finalist is Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers, the third album from Los Angeles comedy troupe Firesign Theater. Although it seems fairly scattershot at the beginning, it slowly becomes clear that the album is telling the life story of a single character named George Leroy Tirebiter, through flashbacks and television. The comedic style has aged poorly, and we wonder how it ever could have been appreciated. The degree to which the work counts as science fiction or fantasy was also perplexing.

Hauser’s Memory, a made-for-television adaptation of Curt Siodmak’s novel of the same name, is a competent if boring spy adventure in which scientist Hillel Mondoro (played by NCIS-regular David McCallum) injects himself with evil brain juice in an attempt to recover secrets that are vital to national security. As the cerebral spinal fluid infects his mind with the memories of a Nazi scientist, Mondoro is compelled to commit a series of crimes, and finally dies. It’s slow-moving, uses excessive crossfades to depict the disorientation of the protagonist, and treads many similar plot points of the author’s previous and much superior novel, Donovan’s Brain.

Sharp-eyed Canadian political
buffs may recognize that the role
of Joseph Slaughter in Hauser's
Memory is played by the younger
brother of Deputy Prime Minister
Erik Nielsen. 
(Image via IMDB)

Viewers of the era were somewhat more generous, with Hank Davis writing in Yandro that Hauser’s Memory was “The next best thing I have seen this year.” Of course, this assessment needs to be taken in context.

Tying into the nascent environmental movement, No Blade of Grass updated the John Cristopher novel The Death of Grass to make it clear that the demise of all plants from the Gramineae family is caused in part by pollution. There are some interesting scenes that foreshadow later post apocalyptic films like Mad Max, and the bleak premise is followed through to a logical conclusion. It’s an uneven effort that has some high points — such as the sadly realistic depiction of an incompetent British government sacrificing millions of people — but it is bogged down by brutal misogyny and clumsy foreshadowing.

Given the distasteful treatment of women in the movie, it’s hard to recommend No Blade of Grass to a modern (or truth be told any) audience.

The most redeemable work on the Hugo Best Dramatic Presentation ballot in 1971 was certainly Colossus: The Forbin Project. From opening scenes exploring a mountain-sized computer, the movie draws in the viewer to a world that becomes quickly dominated by an artificial intelligence designed to bring peace. It’s a great concept that’s mostly followed through on. Eric Braeden is excellent in the lead role of Dr. Charles Forbin, though the supporting cast is mostly merely filling space.

Contemporaneous reviewers generally agreed with this assessment. Richard E. Geis, writing in Science Fiction Review, named Colossus as the only noteworthy science fiction film of the year. Kay Anderson was somewhat more effusive with her praise, writing in Yandro “For my money, The Forbin Project is better than 2001 … Reviews around here are calling it a masterpiece, and I’ll drink to that.”

The pickings were slim, but in some places you could see the seeds of better things to come, though it might take years — even decades — for these themes to flourish. No Blade of Grass was not in the same league as the environmental parables that would be released later in the decade, but with the benefit of hindsight we can see how it was a stepping stone in the evolution of SFF cinema. Likewise, the concept of a science fiction rock opera concept album may be old hat now, but in 1971, Blows Against The Empire was doing something new. These films — and albums — may be mediocre, but they were pushing the medium forward.

By this point, the Hugos had attempted to recognize works of stage and screen on a dozen occasions, and for a third time in that span Worldcon attendees decided not to present a trophy. Not for the first time, the audience laughed and cheered in approval at the announcement of no award. Thankfully, we can find no record of any representatives of any of the five finalists being in attendance for the ceremony, so they were spared this indignity.

Several members of our cinema club may have ended up voting for no award (though others dislike no award on a matter of principle). Either way the consensus was clear: this was a terrible year for science fiction told by screen or sound.

Please give the German android gigolo movie a Hugo nod

It’ll be an uphill battle to get I’m Your Man the Hugo nod it deserves.

(Image via TIFF)

Of the five Hugo Award-shortlisted movies directed by women, only The Matrix (directed by Lilly and Lana Wachowski) was an original screenplay rather than an adaptation. The other four — Wonder Woman, Birds of Prey, Old Guard and Captain Marvel — are all comic book adaptations.

Of the five Hugo-shortlisted movies that were not in English, only Invention For Destruction (1958) and Last Year at Marienbad (1961) earned less than $5-million in North American cinemas. The three foreign-language movies to have been shortlisted this century were all mainstream hits: Pan’s Labrynth ($60 million domestic box office in 2006), Spirited Away ($10 million domestic box office in 2002), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ($126 million domestic box office in 2000).

So it seems fair to say that a German-language sci-fi romance that earned less than $300,000 in North American cinemas and was written and directed by a woman is unlikely to be noticed by Hugo Award nominators. But this is a shame, because I’m Your Man is a quiet, thoughtful, compassionate, and nuanced movie directed and scripted by Maria Schrader based on a short story by Emma Braslavsky. And it is exactly what the award should be recognizing. 

Set in a near-future Hamburg, I’m Your Man follows Dr. Alma Felser (Maren Eggert), an anthropology

Maren Eggert and Dan Stevens
don't exactly have chemistry,
they have something far more
… calculated than that.
(Image via NationalPost)

professor who has begrudgingly agreed to conduct an assessment of Tom (Dan Stevens), a prototype of an android designed to be a romantic partner. Fesler, a divorcee who has put her career first, is dubious of the android’s value and participates in the assessment as a favour to the head of a university department with which she is affiliated.

Despite an initial clinical detachment, Dr. Felser begins to be enticed by the android’s meticulous focus on being the ideal romantic partner. But she can’t fully buy into the experience because she knows that every perfect moment is the product of research, psychology, and algorithms. Simultaneously, she’s challenged emotionally by her ex-husband and his new girlfriend’s decision to have a baby together. This is all, of course, standard plot tension for a romance film.

What’s refreshing, for both AI and romance films, is that I’m Your Man feels like a deeply personal

Director Maria Schrader might
be familiar to SFF fans as 
Quissima Dhatt in the BBC
adaptation of The City & The City.
(Image via Radio Times)

movie, comfortable both with its own awkwardness, and with tackling the difficulties of relationships and the contradictory desires of humans. This is not a movie that follows standard Hollywood narrative patterns, or focus-grouped easy satisfaction conclusions, but rather tells a story that one person wanted to tell. And it’s stronger for that. Writer-director Maria Schrader is probably best-known in North America for directing the Netflix drama Unorthodox, for which she won an Emmy, though she also had a supporting role in the BBC TV series adapted from China Miéville’s Hugo-winning novel The City and the City.

As a dialogue and interaction-focused science fiction movie that is quite at odds with the dynamics of most American cinema, I’m Your Man might not have worked if it weren’t for the superb performances of the two leads.

Dan Stevens, who is probably most famous to SFF fans for playing David Haller in the superhero TV show Legion or for playing Alexander Lemtov in last year’s Hugo finalist Eurovision, alternates disconcertingly between charm and a lack of affect in possibly his finest performance to date. Evident in this performance are insights into what humanoid robots might actually be like, and this is part of what makes I’m Your Man so good as a work of science fiction. It’s a movie that grapples with the consequences of fulfilling humanity’s emotional needs through simulacra and artifice. It’s a movie that understands the seductive and dangerous allure of lying to ourselves.

But the real stand-out of the movie is Maren Eggert, who fully embodies the complexities and passion of an academic. Viewers who have worked at an institution of higher learning will recognize small details and nuances in her depiction of Dr. Alma Felser; the excitement of new knowledge, and the heartbreak at seeing someone else publish the idea first. Those who have struggled to find a romantic relationship that fits with a self-imposed, demanding career will likewise find a lot to appreciate in Eggert’s performance.

I’m Your Man is possibly the finest robot story brought to the screen since Fondly Farenheit was adapted as Murder And The Android in 1959. It deserves your attention, and no matter how unlikely a contender it might be, I’m Your Man deserves to make Hugo history as the first foreign-language movie directed by a woman to make the shortlist.