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factitiousThis is the Best Movie category, because Hugo voters refuse to nominate non-movies for it. I'm judging them not just by how much I liked the movies, but by how well I think they worked as works of speculative fiction. My reasoning for that is that this lens is what differentiates this category from any generic "Best Movie" contest. Because I went into these movies looking to assess them as speculative fiction, I didn't enjoy the ones that failed at being speculative fiction as much as I might have without that mindset. So, be aware of that bias of mine.
Palm Springs is a time loop romantic comedy. I'm in favor of improving all movie genres with time loops. I liked how in the early stages of Nyles and Sarah's relationship, the time loop's a device for showing them fixating on each other; they only care about each other because everyone else just gets reset. The time loop's also used for comedy; seeing people pull off amazing feats due to having been through it all before is an obvious staple. I had a great time watching this.
I was feeling a bit unconvinced about being stuck in the loop being as bad as Sarah thought it was, but the reveal about how she spent her night before the time loop did a great job of explaining that. There is one notable plot hole, where having the goat exit the time loop causes it to not be present at all on later loops, but when Nyles exits, Roy can still meet a version of him who doesn't remember the loops. That's not a big enough issue to bump this out of first place.
Birds of Prey is a better than average superhero movie. Lots of fun visuals, with a willingness to go nondiagetic and just draw stuff on the screen that reminded me of the Scott Pilgrim movie (also, both those movies have Mary Elizabeth Winstead in them).
The movie wants me to be enthusiastic about the girl power inherent in having characters get brought together by all being badass women, and I don't think I'm cis enough to enjoy that without any reservations. There was more work put into justifying it than that bit in Avengers: Endgame, at least. But that aside, there's a sense of genuine fun here that puts it a bit above No Award for me.
Soul was a surprise. I'd thought this was a movie about the afterlife, about how souls work, what they do, all that stuff. Turns out the movie doesn't care about that beyond set dressing. There's a lot of cosmology about systems that are set up for producing souls, giving them traits, sending them to Earth - and none of it is motivated. New souls exist in a field where beings named Jerry direct them into buildings that give them traits, like Jerry will say "you five, go in there and become anxious," and so on. Why does it work that way? Because this magic being having a name like Jerry is goofy fun. Why was this nominated for a speculative fiction award?
The Old Guard was a fairly boring action movie. My patience for long scenes of people shooting at each other is low. I also don't like how bleak this view of immortality is. Couldn't they find a better way to spend their superpowered lives than killing people and talking about the loneliness of being alive? Do the writers think that if they were immortal, this is all they'd bother to do?
The main characters don't want to have scientists learn how their immortality works and whether it can help people. Chief argument for not doing that: the one pharmaceutical guy who wants to do it happens to also be extremely evil and violent. Sure, working with that guy is bad, but they're resourceful, he can't have been the only option. The movie sort of presents another argument: these immortals, Andy in particular, have been saving people's lives over the centuries, and somehow, the people they save all have descendants who go on to do great things for the world. So really, they're doing the best thing they can already with their mercenary work. Except they didn't seem to realize they'd happened to be choosing people with amazing descendants. The only explanation for why that's happening is "maybe this is what you're meant for." Then same reasoning applies to everything else about them: people become immortal because it's meant to be, they lose their immortality and die when that's their time. Who's the one meaning for this to happen, who's deciding this should be how their destinies work? That's unstated, and presumably we're supposed to think God, but very clearly it's the writers. This is the shallowest sort of explanation.
I'm glad someone finally decided to make a movie based on a word square, but I wish they'd done a better job of it. Tenet is even more of a boring action movie than The Old Guard. The backwards causality objects are an interesting idea, but not one that the movie handles consistently. I do not believe anyone making this had a sensible model in their head of how inverted objects and non-inverted objects mechanically interact. Yes, that's a hard problem. It's a necessary problem to deal with if you want to make a movie about it.
It was bizarre how the emotional stakes kept coming back to Kat's son. There were plenty of other reasons we could have cared about what was going on. At one point, and I'm really not making this up, we're told there's a danger of something happening that could destroy the Earth and kill everybody, and Kat exclaims "Including my son!"
The movie was lazy, it didn't care about its premise in a science fiction way, and the characters were unlikeable chess pieces. I'm ranking this in the lowest place possible: above Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was easily the worst of these movies. I actually wrote that sentence before having watched two of the other movies, because I was that sure there couldn't be two films this bad both getting on the ballot.
The movie is structured like a comedy, but instead of having jokes, it has scenes that go on awkwardly long. Lars is actively unlikeable, going very far out of his way to remind us that he's a terrible person and we shouldn't care about his desire to win Eurovision. This desire is never really explored; the movie doesn't bother to sell the audience on what makes Eurovision so wonderful. My best guess is that it's aimed at people who already love Eurovision so much that they'll watch any movie that has "Eurovision" in the title.
I found the incest teasing both unpleasant and badly done. I don't even think people who are into incest would get much out of it, although I guess it's possible what they want are love stories where the characters and audience are uncertain if the characters are siblings for a while before finding out at the end that they're definitely not. My take is that growing up thinking they might be siblings is the problematic part of incest whether or not they turn out to be blood relatives. I should clarify, it's not the only reason I don't think Sigrit should be in this relationship. Lars is her mean childhood friend with a history of acting petty and angry in ways that hurt her.
I did think it was interesting that the seductive foreign musicians get presented as antagonists but never do anything actually bad. They're fairly nice to the Icelandic singers, judging by their actions throughout, they just occupy a villain role in the story's badly thought-out plot. I don't think this is intended to be a twist, though, so much as the writers forgetting to give us reasons to see them as bad. Well, either that, or the writers assumed the audience would be so homophobic we wouldn't need more reasons. Except that makes the target audience homophobes who love Eurovision but also love stuff about how Eurovision's totally gay. And who also want a very specific sort of almost-incest. Imagining a hypothetical person who would enjoy this movie is getting complicated.
Finally, I didn't think it was much of a fantasy movie. There are fantastic elements with the elves, but they're such a minor part of the story that I don't think the film should be primarily classified that way. I don't want to pin too much on this point, though, it's really the least of my problems with it.
Palm Springs > Birds of Prey > No Award > Soul > The Old Guard > Tenet > Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
Palm Springs is a time loop romantic comedy. I'm in favor of improving all movie genres with time loops. I liked how in the early stages of Nyles and Sarah's relationship, the time loop's a device for showing them fixating on each other; they only care about each other because everyone else just gets reset. The time loop's also used for comedy; seeing people pull off amazing feats due to having been through it all before is an obvious staple. I had a great time watching this.
I was feeling a bit unconvinced about being stuck in the loop being as bad as Sarah thought it was, but the reveal about how she spent her night before the time loop did a great job of explaining that. There is one notable plot hole, where having the goat exit the time loop causes it to not be present at all on later loops, but when Nyles exits, Roy can still meet a version of him who doesn't remember the loops. That's not a big enough issue to bump this out of first place.
Birds of Prey is a better than average superhero movie. Lots of fun visuals, with a willingness to go nondiagetic and just draw stuff on the screen that reminded me of the Scott Pilgrim movie (also, both those movies have Mary Elizabeth Winstead in them).
The movie wants me to be enthusiastic about the girl power inherent in having characters get brought together by all being badass women, and I don't think I'm cis enough to enjoy that without any reservations. There was more work put into justifying it than that bit in Avengers: Endgame, at least. But that aside, there's a sense of genuine fun here that puts it a bit above No Award for me.
Soul was a surprise. I'd thought this was a movie about the afterlife, about how souls work, what they do, all that stuff. Turns out the movie doesn't care about that beyond set dressing. There's a lot of cosmology about systems that are set up for producing souls, giving them traits, sending them to Earth - and none of it is motivated. New souls exist in a field where beings named Jerry direct them into buildings that give them traits, like Jerry will say "you five, go in there and become anxious," and so on. Why does it work that way? Because this magic being having a name like Jerry is goofy fun. Why was this nominated for a speculative fiction award?
The Old Guard was a fairly boring action movie. My patience for long scenes of people shooting at each other is low. I also don't like how bleak this view of immortality is. Couldn't they find a better way to spend their superpowered lives than killing people and talking about the loneliness of being alive? Do the writers think that if they were immortal, this is all they'd bother to do?
The main characters don't want to have scientists learn how their immortality works and whether it can help people. Chief argument for not doing that: the one pharmaceutical guy who wants to do it happens to also be extremely evil and violent. Sure, working with that guy is bad, but they're resourceful, he can't have been the only option. The movie sort of presents another argument: these immortals, Andy in particular, have been saving people's lives over the centuries, and somehow, the people they save all have descendants who go on to do great things for the world. So really, they're doing the best thing they can already with their mercenary work. Except they didn't seem to realize they'd happened to be choosing people with amazing descendants. The only explanation for why that's happening is "maybe this is what you're meant for." Then same reasoning applies to everything else about them: people become immortal because it's meant to be, they lose their immortality and die when that's their time. Who's the one meaning for this to happen, who's deciding this should be how their destinies work? That's unstated, and presumably we're supposed to think God, but very clearly it's the writers. This is the shallowest sort of explanation.
I'm glad someone finally decided to make a movie based on a word square, but I wish they'd done a better job of it. Tenet is even more of a boring action movie than The Old Guard. The backwards causality objects are an interesting idea, but not one that the movie handles consistently. I do not believe anyone making this had a sensible model in their head of how inverted objects and non-inverted objects mechanically interact. Yes, that's a hard problem. It's a necessary problem to deal with if you want to make a movie about it.
It was bizarre how the emotional stakes kept coming back to Kat's son. There were plenty of other reasons we could have cared about what was going on. At one point, and I'm really not making this up, we're told there's a danger of something happening that could destroy the Earth and kill everybody, and Kat exclaims "Including my son!"
The movie was lazy, it didn't care about its premise in a science fiction way, and the characters were unlikeable chess pieces. I'm ranking this in the lowest place possible: above Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga.
Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga was easily the worst of these movies. I actually wrote that sentence before having watched two of the other movies, because I was that sure there couldn't be two films this bad both getting on the ballot.
The movie is structured like a comedy, but instead of having jokes, it has scenes that go on awkwardly long. Lars is actively unlikeable, going very far out of his way to remind us that he's a terrible person and we shouldn't care about his desire to win Eurovision. This desire is never really explored; the movie doesn't bother to sell the audience on what makes Eurovision so wonderful. My best guess is that it's aimed at people who already love Eurovision so much that they'll watch any movie that has "Eurovision" in the title.
I found the incest teasing both unpleasant and badly done. I don't even think people who are into incest would get much out of it, although I guess it's possible what they want are love stories where the characters and audience are uncertain if the characters are siblings for a while before finding out at the end that they're definitely not. My take is that growing up thinking they might be siblings is the problematic part of incest whether or not they turn out to be blood relatives. I should clarify, it's not the only reason I don't think Sigrit should be in this relationship. Lars is her mean childhood friend with a history of acting petty and angry in ways that hurt her.
I did think it was interesting that the seductive foreign musicians get presented as antagonists but never do anything actually bad. They're fairly nice to the Icelandic singers, judging by their actions throughout, they just occupy a villain role in the story's badly thought-out plot. I don't think this is intended to be a twist, though, so much as the writers forgetting to give us reasons to see them as bad. Well, either that, or the writers assumed the audience would be so homophobic we wouldn't need more reasons. Except that makes the target audience homophobes who love Eurovision but also love stuff about how Eurovision's totally gay. And who also want a very specific sort of almost-incest. Imagining a hypothetical person who would enjoy this movie is getting complicated.
Finally, I didn't think it was much of a fantasy movie. There are fantastic elements with the elves, but they're such a minor part of the story that I don't think the film should be primarily classified that way. I don't want to pin too much on this point, though, it's really the least of my problems with it.
Palm Springs > Birds of Prey > No Award > Soul > The Old Guard > Tenet > Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga
