Matthew's Journal

This is the last of this year's Hugo Award shortlist for dramatic presentation long form. It's very strange. Owen and Maddy are disaffected teenagers who bond over their obsession with The Pink Opaque. How much of it is warping their perception of reality or actually warping reality is left unanswered; the whole film proceeds at a very slow pace, and that plus the occasional breaking of the fourth wall give it a dreamlike or nightmareish quality. I think it is talking about fandom, queerness, and gender, but I didn't really get it. And the end was a damp squib.

I didn't vote in this category, but if I had I think I would have ranked Flow first; it came second behind Dune.

It's past the voting deadline, and I didn't vote in the dramatic presentation long form category, but I'm still trying to watch the shortlisted films.

I'd not seen Dune part one, so watched that and then part two (which was on the shortlist this year). It's one book turned into two lengthy films, and part two has a rubbish ending - we get no sense of Paul becoming Emperor as any kind of triumph before it's undermined by the immediate start of the next war. They are both grand spectacles, but their pacing is odd - at times it seems to be dragging and then key events are rather rushed over (so you're left not really quite understanding what happened without resorting to plot summaries after the fact). And the racial politics have dated poorly, shall we say? And I don't think the whole sandworm ecosystem is even vaguely plausible. But there's some great scheming and some interesting characters (albeit that a lot of the villains are entirely 2-dimensional).

The Wild Robot is an altogether different film, very heavy-handed with its messaging and happy to tug on the heart-strings. The plot doesn't really stand up to scrutiny (robot has access to all human knowledge, but doesn't know how geese swim? etc.), but it's well-animated and has lots of fun moments. And despite being the film of the first book of a trilogy, it actually has a decent ending! But I really struggled to suspend my disbelief because the plot is so full of holes.

This is a prequel to Mad Max: Fury Road, and provides the backstory for Imperator Furiosa in that film. So here we see her life from a child in one of the remaining green places to the Imperator we meet in Fury Road.

Aside from the opening, this film is very much in the orange-and-black dieselpunk post-apocalyptic vein of Fury Road. There's a lot of high-speed chase-come-fight sequences, which are quite the spectacle, a fair amount of bloody violence, and some quirky funny moments (especially from Chris Hemsworth as Dementus), which provide a little comic relief.

Furiosa doesn't let off full throttle very often, so this is not one to watch for interesting ideas or a nuanced plot. But if you can avoid thinking too hard about how plausible it all is (or isn't), it is pretty entertaining.

This is the first in a two-part adaptation of the musical of the book (which is in turn a re-interpretation of The Wizard of Oz investigating the Wicked Witch of the West's backstory). It's a very long time since I saw The Wizard of Oz, and I've not read the Wicked book nor seen the musical. ( review, with spoilers )

The songs are reasonable (though none of them have stuck in my head), the leads are very good, and it's very pretty. And I was pleased to recognise Peter Dinklage by his voice :) But I don't think I'd recommend it as a film.

I've consumed two things from the 2025 Hugo Award shortlist recently. They're Quite Different.

The first was The Tainted Cup, by Robert Jackson Bennett. I loved this; it's a crime thriller set in a fantasy world, where The Empire exists to keep its people safe from Leviathans. It has a lot of what you'd expect from the crime genre; whilst a couple of times that meant that I spotted the plot twist or reveal coming, there was still plenty here to keep me guessing (and turning the pages). It also talks about power and money (and how those with both can often keep clear of the law), and perhaps something about how we treat those who aren't the same as ourselves. There are some quite gruesome bits. I have a suspicion that there may be a sequel or two, which I look forward to reading :)

Flow is an animated film without any dialogue. After some apocalypse that has removed all of humanity, a flood comes, and a little cat (our point-of-view character) is nearly swept away. Over time it meets and befriends some other animals, and they have adventures together. This is not a plot-driven film, and I think works better if thought of as a poem in cinematic form. There are moments of very authentical animal behaviour, and also some rather less plausible ones (like animals being able to operate a tiller). I would have liked to have seen this on a big screen, I think.

This is a very strange film (and, I now learn, an adaptation of a 1992 novel, which takes a rather different perspective on some of the key events). There is a surreal steampunk-ish air to the world it is set in, and plenty of echos of Frankenstein, particularly in the idea that one can transplant a brain (and thus a personality) into another body. It's visually and musically striking.

Emma Stone's performance as Bella is the engine around which the film runs, and she is really good. Aside from the cringe moments, there are some laugh-out-loud funny moments; the other thing that stands out is the significant quantity of sex. It feels rather like Bella is discovering about herself and the world by having a lot of sex. And yet we mostly hear men talking about Bella and her behaviour and the sex she's having, and I worry that the liberation Bella finds is in no longer caring that she's being exploited by men. Also, pretty much everyone in the film is more or less terrible.

Wandering Earth II is on the Hugo shortlist this year. We'd not seen Wandering Earth, so decided to watch that first. Whilst this was probably necessary to get a chunk of what goes on in Wandering Earth II (which is in fact a prequel), I think it did cause us to start Wandering Earth II expecting the worst.

I didn't think much of Wandering Earth - it was visually very impressive, and tugged at the heart-strings, but key aspects of the plot just didn't make sense and were too implausible even for sci-fi.

Without getting into spoilers, the same can be said of the prequel; too much of the plot was based on engineering/science so bad as to disengage my suspension of disbelief. Again, it's visually stunning, and the emotional set-pieces hit home, but the plot just didn't work for me. I found the device of announcing "[time period] to [next crisis/key plot event]" a bit jarring, too. I'm afraid the final plot twist/reveal felt hollow too, although it is presumably the setup for the third film.

Barbie lives a perfect life in Barbie world, which is ever so pink, and where the Kens exist to be decorative. Until she starts to experience interference from the Real World, and must go to investigate. The trailer has more spoilers than that...

This is an odd movie; it has some laugh-out-loud funny moments, too much cringe for me, and a plot that begs you not to look to hard at it. And what happened to the narrator for the middle two-thirds? I think it can't work out if it's a satire of Barbie, a homage to Barbie as a feminist icon, marketing for Barbie, or nostalgia for adults who remember when they played with Barbie; given some of its content and its 12 rating in the UK, it's really not aimed at kids who currently love Barbie.

The streaming platform I watched it on offered me Grave of the Fireflies as "watch next", which would have been quite a tonal shift...

This is a sequel to Into the Spider-Verse, which I rather enjoyed. I'm afraid I was less happy with this film. Part of it is the lack of adequate ending; this just sort of stops (with some cliff-hangers) ready for the next film in the series. Partly it's that the multiverse thing is less new than it was in the previous film, and the whole musing-on-canon-thing feels too much like a plot device than something that really makes sense.

The action sequences are really good, though, and there's plenty of nice details that go flying past. And maybe the sequel will make it all worthwhile...

Nimona is set in a scifi-faux-medieval walled city (with cell phones, a metro system, flying cars, and armoured knights); we are told that in the distant past Gloreth defeated a giant black monster and enclosed the city with a wall to keep the citizens safe. In the present, the anarchic Nimona turns up in the lair of the fugitive Ballister and declares that she's going to be his sidekick.

I enjoyed this - it's fast-paced and funny (without being cringey!), and keeps teasing you that it's going to lapse into fairy-story tropes only to swerve at the last moment. There's some nice queer representation, and the characters are pretty believable. It has things to say about being different and being the outcast, and how hard it can be to try and be normal enough to fit in. ( Spoilers )