From AwardAnnals
Results of the Hugo Award in the year 1985. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
2010: The Year We Make Contact
Peter Hyams
No director could ever have hoped to repeat the artistic achievement of Stanley Kubrick’s
2001: A Space Odyssey, and nobody knew that better than Peter Hyams, who made this much more conventional film from the first of three sequel novels by Arthur C. Clarke. Whereas Kubrick made a poetic film of mind-expanding ideas and metaphysical mysteries, Hyams shouldn’t be blamed for taking a more practical, crowd-pleasing approach. In revealing much of what Kubrick deliberately left unexplained,
2010 lacks the enigmatic awe of its predecessor, but it’s still…
Dune
David Lynch
Even more than most of David Lynch’s deliberately bizarre and idiosyncratic movies,
Dune is a “love-it-or-hate-it” affair. An ambitious, epic, utterly mind-boggling—and, let’s admit it, all-out weird—adaptation of Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel,
Dune remains one of the most controversial films in the director’s exceedingly provocative career. The story (if
Dune can be said to have just one story) is complex and convoluted in the epic tradition; it has something to do with political intrigue and a planet that is home to a…
Ghostbusters
Ivan Reitman
Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis wrote the script, but Bill Murray gets all the best lines and moments in this 1984 comedy directed by Ivan Reitman (
Meatballs). The three comics, plus Ernie Hudson, play the New York City-based team that provides supernatural pest control, and Sigourney Weaver is the love interest possessed by an ancient demon. Reitman and company are full of original ideas about hobgoblins—who knew they could “slime” people with green plasma goo?—but hovering above the plot is Murray’s patented ironic view of all the action. Still a lot of…
The Last Starfighter
Nick Castle
At the time of its original release in 1984, this modestly budgeted sci-fi excursion had the distinction of offering some of the first examples of purely computer-generated animation, an apt (and frugal) special-effects solution for a movie with a plot line rooted in computer games. Both the computer-generated visuals and the arcade game now look quaint, but writer-director Nick Castle’s affable, good- hearted adventure holds up nicely, thanks to a clever premise—the title game is actually a test for prospective starship pilots, planted by embattled aliens under…
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: 3rd in Original Cast series
Leonard Nimoy
You didn’t think Mr. Spock was
really dead, did you? When Spock’s casket landed on the surface of the Genesis planet at the end of
Star Trek II, we had already been told that Genesis had the power to bring “life from lifelessness.” So it’s no surprise that this energetic but somewhat hokey sequel gives Spock a new lease on life, beginning with his rebirth and rapid growth as the Genesis planet literally shakes itself apart in a series of tumultuous geological spasms. As Kirk is getting to know his estranged son (Merritt Butrick), he must also do…
