Cliffhanger (1993)

 

Cliffhanger was nominated for three technical Oscars (Sound, Sound Effects Editing, and Visual Effects) but lost all three of them to the juggernaut that was/is Jurassic Park. The stunt work in Cliffhanger is spectacular, top-notch, but it’s tough to compete with those amazingly realistic-looking dinosaurs. The plot involves the search for $100 million in uncirculated U.S. currency that was stolen from a Treasury Department plane. Sylvester Stallone plays Gabe Walker and Janine Turner (still best known for TV’s Northern Exposure) plays Jessie Dieghan, two rangers who rescue people trapped in the Colorado Rocky Mountains. Gabe has taken eight months away from the job after letting a friend, Sarah, slip from his hand during an attempted rescue; the friend’s boyfriend, Hal Tucker (Michael Rooker, who will always be Daryl’s older brother on The Walking Dead to me), blames Gabe, and Gabe has carried the weight of Sarah’s death to the point of wanting to quit his job. Jessie convinces Gabe to join Hal in responding to a distress signal, not realizing that John Lithgow’s Eric Qualen and his band of international thieves want them to find the three cases of money now lost in the mountains after a failed theft attempt and after their own plane has crashed, leaving them stranded with just a honing device to help them find the missing cases. Qualen, working with turncoat U.S. Treasury agent Richard Travers (Rex Linn), and his cohort are very sadistic and easily angered. They always seem ready to kill someone for no significant reason; they even kill Ralph Waite’s Frank, a helicopter pilot who has merely tried to rescue them, and one of a pair of young guys who are just out to ski and jump and have some fun in the mountains. Stallone’s Gabe systematically sabotages the efforts by Qualen’s group to retrieve the money. He makes certain that something goes wrong with each case, and it’s fun to watch so much money get blown up or set on fire or tossed into a helicopter’s blades and shredded. The villains are universally evil and heartless, only interested in getting their money, not matter the human cost that it takes. They’re almost cartoonish in their brutality, but that violence is graphically depicted onscreen. It’s an adventure movie, really, with the money only serving as the maguffin for the plot. It’s the stunt performers who get the most attention. Aside from the scenes of people scaling numerous mountains, Cliffhanger also showcases a transfer of people and the cases of money from one plane to another in midair – well, I should say the attempted transfer of the money since that’s what sets the main portion of the plot in motion. It’s possible that you’ll be able to predict the outcome of the movie by the time you’ve watched the first half (or even third), but that doesn’t detract from the overall impact of the visual effects.

Oscar Nominations: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects

Jurassic Park (1993)

The most important factor in making Jurassic Park a huge success is how realistically the dinosaurs appear to be. If it weren’t for Steven Spielberg and the rest of the film’s crew using the best of computer-generated imagery, the film wouldn’t be as powerful as it is. Sure, we want to see imperiled humans—and if there’s a little bit of romance and perhaps some competing ideas for how to survive, so much the better—but if those humans are running from dinosaurs that look fake, then we’re going to be less invested in their outcome. And Jurassic Park didn’t win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects for nothing. Was it even a contest against Cliffhanger? Maybe The Nightmare Before Christmas had a shot, but it should have had the opportunity to be named Best Animated Feature, a category the Academy Awards wouldn’t create for another eight years, but that’s getting off topic. Jurassic Park is rather canny in its revealing of the first onscreen dinosaur, a brachiosaurus, about twenty minutes into the action. From that moment on, our attention is most enraptured when we get to see the dinosaurs in action, no matter the human cost involved. The plot is relatively simple, actually. Richard Attenborough’s John Hammond has populated a remote island near Costa Rica with dinosaurs. He and a team of scientists have extracted dinosaur DNA from insects preserved in amber and hatched a lot of dangerous beasts (and a few gentle ones). However, he has to demonstrate to the park’s investors that the island will be a safe location for a sort of amusement park. Hammond enlists the aid of Sam Neill’s Dr. Alan Grant, a paleontologist, and Dr. Ellie Sattler, a paleobotanist, to help him support his vision. The investors’ attorney brings along Dr. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum being his most frustratingly Goldblum-ian), a mathematician in love with chaos theory. They’re amazed by what they see but also fearful of what could happen when humans and dinosaurs start to encounter each other. It doesn’t take long for a tour of the park, now including Hammond’s two grandchildren along for the ride, to go badly awry. The park’s chief computer programmer, Dennis (Wayne Knight, just as wonderfully unctuous here as he was Seinfeld), plans to steal some DNA samples for one of Hammond’s rivals, and he sabotages the security systems, and then the fun begins. The attack by the Tyrannosaurus rex is justifiably famous, a masterpiece of editing that places the viewer in a series of uncomfortable positions, sometimes as witness, sometimes as victim, sometimes as attacker. I’ve used it multiple times in my film studies classes. However, as scary as the T-rex is, the velociraptors are truly the stars of this first film of what became a hugely successful franchise. The raptors are clever and dangerous, and their attacks are relentless. They pop up at the most surprising of times, and it’s a visual delight to see them square off against the T-rex at the film’s end. Jurassic Park does feature a couple of moments of gentle sweetness. Neill’s Grant winds up caring for the children as they make their way back to the safety of headquarters even though he didn’t much like children at the film’s beginning. Yet those kinds of moments are overshadowed by ones like the scene where three raptors track down the children in the kitchen of the visitor center. Jurassic Park was Spielberg’s “other” film from 1993, his more famous artistic achievement being the Best Picture winner Schindler’s List. Pairing the two films does allow us to see the range of his talents, from well-crafted popular entertainment to serious-minded and thoughtful dramas.

Oscar Wins: Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing, and Best Visual Effects 

In the Name of the Father (1993)

In the Name of the Father, a nominee for Best Picture of 1993, is a gripping story of a man falsely accused of the bombing of a London pub in the 1970s. It's based upon the true story of Gerry Conlon, who spent fifteen years in prison after he was tortured and coerced into signing a false confession to the crime. Three other people also go to prison for the crime, and Gerry's father and several more are also imprisoned for their alleged complicity in carrying it out. The movie is set during a time when there was great tension between the English, particularly those in London, and the Irish, especially anyone suspected of being a member of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). What In the Name of the Father does expertly is capture those mutual feelings of distrust.

As Gerry Conlon, Daniel Day-Lewis gives another of his intense performances; he does love to burrow into his characters, and the more complex and complicated they are, the better he seems to like them. As his father, Guiseppe, Pete Postlethwait is a study in quiet dignity. The scenes in prison, where father and son share a cell, are particularly illuminating of the differences between these men. And Emma Thompson provides a couple of sharp moments as the attorney who has taken up the Conlons' case, especially in the courtroom scenes that end the movie.

This is a well-made film filled with a great deal of politically charged dialogue. You certainly get the Irish perspective on the events here, and with the exception of Thompson's lawyer, you get a strong sense that the English people are too filled with their hatred of the Irish and the IRA (and an inability to distinguish between the two) to provide justice. I had a powerful feeling of being manipulated throughout this film to take the side of the Conlons without question. Undoubtedly, they were innocent of the crimes with which they were charged, but the movie is a bit heavy-handed in its depictions of the English. Surely, there must have been some honest members of the British police, for example, or someone who would have taken up this cause before Thompson's attorney appears many years after they have begun their prison terms.

Still, such an approach is understandable, given the predominance of the English perspective in films on this issue. The English have always had a strained relationship with the Irish, particularly those in Northern Ireland, where the early scenes of this film are set. What In the Name of the Father captures, perhaps even more accurately than the events surrounding the Conlons, is the way that the Irish and the English coexisted, frequently with violence and almost always with distrust. It offers us a window into a time that we in the United States probably know too little about.

The Fugitive (1993)

I was a bit surprised at how old-fashioned a movie The Fugitive, a 1993 nominee for Best Picture, is. I don't mean that in the sense that it sounds, perhaps, but this movie is a tribute to the ways that suspense and drama and even special effects used to be handled before CGI took over the world. This film isn't really that old, but no one in Hollywood makes movies like this now, ones where character development gets more screen time than explosions.

The movie's plot borrows only loosely from the television show that inspired it. Dr. Richard Kimble's wife is murdered, he goes to jail for the crime, yet he manages to escape and tries to clear his name by finding the one-armed man with whom he struggled on the night of his wife's death. The rest of the movie really follows a couple of plot lines: one involving Kimble's attempts to locate information about his wife's killer and the other involving the federal marshals led by Tommy Lee Jones in their attempt to locate Kimble.

Both Harrison Ford as Kimble and Jones as Marshall Samuel Gerard are excellent here; these are two smart actors who allow audiences to see the ways they are trying to trick each other throughout the plot. Ford, in particular, gets to do some amazing work here, displaying a range of emotions from the devastation of finding his wife dead to anger when he confronts publicly the man responsible for her death. He also gets to show how quickly a person can think under pressure; none of his actions seem completely out of the realm of possibility. Jones has a more internal performance. His are the not the big action scenes; instead, he must show Gerard's way of thinking. It's a tough job to pull off for most actors, but not Jones, who is a master of both hiding and revealing emotions on the screen. His interactions with the deputy marshals is a highlight of the film for me. They trade barbs and speculations, but Jones is almost always proven to be right.

The train crash that allows Kimble to escape imprisonment is pretty spectacular. (It does put the one in The Greatest Show on Earth to shame, but that was 40 years earlier, after all.) However, most of the action of the film is not dependent upon spectacle. This is not a movie where special effects dominate the story. Instead, they arise from the plot in a very organic fashion. It's quite remarkable to think how much movies have already changed in just the last 15 years. If this film were to be remade today--and please, don't get the idea to do that--it would undoubtedly be a special effects bonanza. However, we care more about Kimble and what happens to him because there is a human at the heart of this story, not explosions.