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Hugo-winning movies
Oct. 11th, 2008 08:23 amInteresting disagreements going on in a File 770 comments thread over whether the film E.T. rulz or sux. I deleted the phrase "crassly manipulative (but then, it's a Spielberg film)" from my comment before posting, because I didn't want to needle Mike, who thinks it should have won the Hugo over Blade Runner (which we both liked).
Probably the most irritating thing about E.T. is that it's one of two stories that comes to mind (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of course being the other) in which the Christ-like death-and-resurrection of a protagonist is the point of the story. (Gandalf also dies and is resurrected, but while his return is essential, the storyline doesn't hinge on the event - just one example of how Tolkien did it better than anyone else.) Who knows what Spielberg was thinking, but Lewis was trying to slip the Christian myth past what he called "the watchful dragons" of skeptical minds.
The problem is that it doesn't work. This non-Christian finds Aslan's death-and-resurrection weirdly arbitrary, and E.T.'s pointless. (I cannot remember, at this distance in time, why E.T. died at all, except to vaguely recall that it puzzled me at the time too.) Both function as Jackson-like extraneous diversions from what ought to be the storyline. Gandalf, by contrast, died for a good reason integral to the plot, but then Tolkien, as I already said ...
But Blade Runner, imperfect as it was (that mechanical pseudo-noir voice-over!), deserved and won the Hugo that year. Interesting that, though I'm not much of a movie-goer, I've seen all the Hugo-winning films since a TV episode last won the combined DP award 11 years ago. (I'm not going back further than that for now.) And to one extent or another I liked them all, even Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, though there are some cases where I thought another film was better. Winners to 2007; 2008 ( And the details are )
Probably the most irritating thing about E.T. is that it's one of two stories that comes to mind (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe of course being the other) in which the Christ-like death-and-resurrection of a protagonist is the point of the story. (Gandalf also dies and is resurrected, but while his return is essential, the storyline doesn't hinge on the event - just one example of how Tolkien did it better than anyone else.) Who knows what Spielberg was thinking, but Lewis was trying to slip the Christian myth past what he called "the watchful dragons" of skeptical minds.
The problem is that it doesn't work. This non-Christian finds Aslan's death-and-resurrection weirdly arbitrary, and E.T.'s pointless. (I cannot remember, at this distance in time, why E.T. died at all, except to vaguely recall that it puzzled me at the time too.) Both function as Jackson-like extraneous diversions from what ought to be the storyline. Gandalf, by contrast, died for a good reason integral to the plot, but then Tolkien, as I already said ...
But Blade Runner, imperfect as it was (that mechanical pseudo-noir voice-over!), deserved and won the Hugo that year. Interesting that, though I'm not much of a movie-goer, I've seen all the Hugo-winning films since a TV episode last won the combined DP award 11 years ago. (I'm not going back further than that for now.) And to one extent or another I liked them all, even Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, though there are some cases where I thought another film was better. Winners to 2007; 2008 ( And the details are )
