How The Last Emperor managed to win Best Picture of 1987 is beyond me. So too is the fact it swept nine out of nine Academy Award nominations to be celebrated not just as the year's best film but also as an unblemished recipient of near total critical support.

Importantly the movie going public was a good deal less convinced of the film's excellence having contributed but $44 million in domestic grosses to producer Jeremy Thomas's coffers. Nevertheless, the film holds a permanent place in the pantheon of the Academy Awards records so it behooves this forum to take issue with an historical precedent run amuck.

As such I concede that the most pressing influences elevating The Last Emperor head and shoulders above the rest of the films of its moment were the contribution of writer-director Bernardo Bertolucci and the Eastern focus of the film's narrative. Together these standards of excellence consisting of an auteur personality and a previously unexplored subject easily lend themselves to making prestige films with wide appeal. Not that this wide appeal directly translates into box office gold, public interest or critical celebration, although they usually do with the right kind of marketing, release pattern and exhibition circumstance.

Choosing to focus on the last emperor of China named Pu Yi (played by John Lone as an adult), the film is a sweeping costume drama entirely concerned with the Asian world and its own specific politico-cultural conflicts. It begins with Pu Yi's crowing as emperor at the age of three and continues through his deposition in the 1920s with an episodic structure concerning key events in his adulthood spent largely as a political and cultural refugee. Told with a flashback structure from the pivot of his 1950 interrogation for treasonous crimes committed against China, the one-time emperor tells his life story and is imprisoned for 10 years until he's finally released to Mao's revolution in the 1960s.

As the first film granted permission by the Chinese government to film inside the Forbidden City The Last Emperor is aesthetically beautiful throughout its length. Like a stained glass window it illuminates the character of light and color to reveal what's visible through its aperture. In this case, unfortunately, that visible exhibit is little more than the successful application of costume, art, set and production design elements with excellent photography but without the sense of permanence often created through more resonant themes and a good script. Anything more substantial though seems not to have been the main purpose of Bertolucci's staff and is thus a poor reflection indeed on the resulting spectacle that remains oddly ineffective.

Emptied of any real emotion and robbed of connective possibilities through uneven performance, The Last Emperor is a bore. Though there is the considerable draw of watching Lone and a younger Joan Chen play husband wife with the struggles of a decadent worldview combating real world circumstances, there is the equally implausible Chinese box structure, if you can forgive the pun.

Somewhere in the flashback episodes that tell of Pu Yi's problem of being an imperial symbol longing to actually lead there is a gap in storytelling that remains unforgivable. Namely the whole film assumed his ascension to the throne at a moment when his country was entering its republican phase thereby removing the necessity of having an emperor at all. Pu Yi becomes a persona non grata in his homeland for being royalty but also for hailing from Manchuria, then the site of Japanese colonization efforts and much conflict during World War II.

Why we should care about this pivotal fact and why we should care about Pu Yi is never put under the microscope. Lone is well cast as a handsome and physically appropriate actor for the adult part with his Western features and clear diction. But he is little more than a figurehead who remains inexplicable though not as an obvious tribute to the real-life Pu Yi worthy any kind of enduring mystery. No, his two-dimensionality is one of characterization since we could care less about the last emperor of China even though it seems we're supposed to feel sadness and sympathy for him since he lived a cloistered existence and made a few questionable decisions he couldn't later recant as a worldwide celebrity.

Conveying this essentially silly story, however true and accurate it may or may not be, is not by itself a good reason to devote 160-minutes to watching a beautiful but empty movie. There is no effort to be biographically detailed of the subject in question nor is there an attempt to make Pu Yi out as a legend in his own mind or in the minds of his people. Where this kind of mania might have produced a strong screen character filled with the kind of genius we might expect of the globally famous and politically connected, it may have been too far from the historical truth and the lack of such license in telling the last emperor's story weakens the resulting film.

In fact, such ill-advised attention on the part of the filmmakers is a gaff of such proportion I subsequently find myself questioning the validity of the typical Bertoluccian take where he's presented as a global cinematic creative force on par with no one. Beginning with his early Italian films Before the Revolution and Il Canale, the director was launched into international recognition with his 1970 masterwork The Conformist. Following it up with the infamous Last Tango in Paris, which some call the best film ever produced, 1900 and then Luna, his reputation began to sag in the early '80s. Typically remembered as his return to widespread acclaim, The Last Emperor upped the ante of his previous work and led to other interesting, though smaller films, like The Sheltering Sky and Little Buddha.

As a kind of weigh-in station for his career The Last Emperor is hardly Bertolucci's best work although it is his most widely celebrated. On the one hand this is perhaps due to its high level of film craftsmanship but it must also have something to do with occidental minds looking beyond Eurocentric history and modes of entertainment. While this opening of the center and its mainstream concerns is laudable, there is an awkward way the new foci balance themselves within Bertolucci's film.

For instance, and most grandly, Pu Yi's early life is riddled with material wealth and exquisite circumstances from the moment the Manchurian boy is plucked from relative obscurity and thrust into the center of his country's symbolic core. Colors are vivid, architectural emplacements overlarge and the young emperor's early life is filled with a rigid, controlling perspective that must have been unremittingly claustrophobic.

Exactly matching the film's strengths with its weaknesses these early sections focus on Pu Yi's boyhood and show impressive sets populated by laughable caricatures in the place of meaningful storytelling. Like summer special effects extravaganzas the Forbidden City is a spectacle of such austere magnitude it substitutes all other narrative considerations and becomes a behemoth set piece leading nowhere.

When considering Pu Yi's motivation to finally leave the Forbidden City as a result of the cultural revolution, his simultaneous escape and banishment becomes an overall theme in the movie. Whenever he itches for change and enlightenment he's forced to flee and receive such knowledge on the pitch of new social directions. Significantly this theme is also the means of his eventual incarceration due to his often-misguided attempts to sway the Chinese people that lead him into a dangerous dalliance with Japan ultimately leading to his ruination as a royal symbol and political power.

It's a story that's been told before. It's a story that's been told better on previous occasions. But it's a story Western audiences have largely never seen in the movies, especially when prepared by a director of such weight and grandeur as Bertolucci who focused his many talents on a project with obviously prestigious purposes.

For the record, though, let's also keep in mind that The Last Emperor was nominated for the Academy Awards top honor against four better films. Not only are James L. Brooks's Broadcast News, Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction, John Boorman's Hope and Glory and Norman Jewison's Moonstruck better movies, they are also popular films worthy of repeat consideration and continued celebration.

People enjoy watching the Brooks film about the politics of networks news broadcasts and the related personality conflicts that ensue. Though the Lyne movie's sexual politics are aggressively conservative and, perhaps, anti-woman, it showcases a brilliant Glenn Close performance and a wonderful sense of then-current gender politics. Of course Boorman's memoirish film has a personal touch and who can forget Cher's tour-de-force as a downtrodden middle age woman who comes alive under Jewison's stewardship.

Then, of course, there are other films from 1987 like Stanley Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket that didn't receive any fraction of the attention heaped upon The Last Emperor despite being a better gage of the year's theatrical features as well as being a better movie. But there was also Stephen Frears's Sammy and Rosie Get Laid that remained an art house film for both its British origin and its rather broad social web if not for its excellence. The Coen Brothers released their often bitingly funny comedy Raising Arizona and Paul Verhoeven managed to convey the post-apocalyptic circumstances of Robocop along with well-integrated special effects and a vivid subtext about violence.

Altogether any of these other films were more likable movies than the actual Best Picture winner. Any one of them, and likely several others that still remain vivid to other viewers, would act as likable barometers for 1987's view of that elusive subject we identify as excellence or even artistry.

In short I cannot recommend The Last Emperor to anyone. Overlong, uninteresting, unconvincing as the story of a high-minded man of the people and somehow missing the point, it's a tale without any bite from a reputable creative staff riding the coattails of a legendary director.

For me the real story of the last Chinese emperor would have focused on the walls outside the Forbidden City. The emperor thereby becomes a figure of nostalgic reflection. His life is the chattel of nation building where cultural circumstances created a disturbance that made his very existence unnecessary for the first time in 800 years. His tragedy would have been this loss of purpose without resorting to anecdotal episodes from his own life to organize a story but instead focusing on the changing national landscape as the corpus of his true kingdom.

Making the movie a showpiece for design elements was a mistake. There's simply not enough show within the showpiece and it's obvious from the first few minutes that The Last Emperor is one of those Best Picture winners better left in movie archives and on video store shelves collecting dust.