From AwardAnnals
Results of the Saturn Award in the year 1998. For a ranked list of films, try an honor roll:
Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Jay Roach
If you don’t think
Austin Powers is one of the funniest movies of the 1990s, maybe you should be packed into a cryogenic time-chamber and sent back to the decade whence you came. Perhaps it was the 1960s—the shag-a-delic decade when London hipster Austin Powers scored with gorgeous chicks as a fashion photographer by day, crime-fighting international man of mystery by night. Yeah, baby, yeah! But when Powers’s arch nemesis, Dr. Evil, puts himself into a deep-freeze and travels via time-machine to the late 1990s, Powers must follow him and foil Evil’s…
Batman & Robin
Joel Schumacher
Following Val Kilmer’s portrayal of the caped crusader in
Batman Forever, the fourth
Batman feature stars George Clooney under the pointy-eared cowl, with Chris O’Donnell returning as Robin the Boy Wonder. This time the dynamic duo is up against the nefarious Mr. Freeze (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who is bent on turning the world into an iceberg, and the slyly seductive but highly toxic Poison Ivy (Uma Thurman), who wants to eliminate all animal life and turn the Earth into a gigantic greenhouse. Alicia Silverstone lends a hand as Batgirl, and Elle…
Hercules
John Musker, Ron Clements
Not the egregious foul it seemed to be in theaters,
Hercules stands up as an entertaining spritzer of an animated feature. The continual peppering of in-jokes and cultural references becomes less irksome on video. That there’s no majesty or awe invested in the beloved Greek legends also seems less of an error. Also on the plus side is the bounciest Alan Menken music since
Little Shop of Horrors. With Zeus’s blood in his veins, young Hercules’s amazing strength makes him an outcast (sorry, that still doesn’t fly), so he trains with a satyr named Phil…
The Lost World: Jurassic Park
Steven Spielberg
In the low tradition of knockoff horror flicks best seen (or not seen) on a drive-in movie screen, Steven Spielberg’s sequel to
Jurassic Park is a poorly conceived, ill-organized film that lacks story and logic. Screenwriter David Koepp strings along a number of loose ideas while Jeff Goldblum returns as Ian Malcolm, the quirky chaos theoretician who now reluctantly agrees to go to another island where cloned dinosaurs are roaming freely. Along with his girlfriend (Julianne Moore) and daughter, Malcolm has to deal with hunters, environmentalists, and…
Mousehunt
Gore Verbinski
They’ve tried Catzilla, a feline so ferocious it can’t be euthanized. They’ve tried booby traps that Rube Goldberg would marvel at. They’ve even tried Caesar (hilariously played by Christopher Walken), a demented exterminator whose “Squeak Seeker 2000” mouse-cam will infiltrate even the cleverest rodent’s secret lair. But the Smuntz brothers Ernie (Nathan Lane) and Lars (British comedian Lee Evans) just can’t win against the tenacious mouse that wreaks havoc in the vintage home they’ve inherited from their father. That’s the one-note premise of this chaotic,…
George of the Jungle
Sam Weisman
Not even the executives at Disney could have predicted the runaway success of this live-action movie inspired by Jay Ward’s goofy 1960s cartoon character. Not only did
George make a killing at the box office, but Disney’s marketing wizards turned it into one of their best-selling videos. It’s hard to begrudge the movie’s success, even if this is the kind of mindless entertainment that caters to the lowest common denominator. In any case, it’s obvious that kids love this movie, in which the idiotic George (Brendan Fraser) repeatedly swings into trees and…
