Matthew's Journal

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 )

Avatar: The Way of Water is a sprawling spectacle of a film - over 3 hours long, and a sight to behold (I imagine it is much more impressive in a cinema in 3D, but I'm still not sure cinemas are sensible given Covid). Unfortunately, there isn't really the plot to support such an epic - both not enough plot for a film of this length, and also not enough quality to the plot - it was pretty predictable, saggy, and rather repetitive (even one of the characters complains about being tied to a ship's railings again). I'm not sure there's a lot thematically new here from the previous film (which I watched recently), though I can't really object to "commercial whaling is bad" as a message. The model of fatherhood was pretty weak, though - is "protecting" really all there is to it?

Nope is an altogether different piece of work - a horror film with UFOs that's also about our love of spectacle, how people deal with trauma, and the erasure of black contributions to industry. It also has a great sense of alien menace; but unlike some horror where the antagonist is essentially random, here there is some sense to what is going on. Some good funny moments, too. I'm not quite sure it hangs together as a coherent story, though - there's almost too much going on, with some of the backstories, and the various different character arcs.

Another film from the Hugo shortlist, this is a coming-of-age drama about a girl who turns into a giant fuzzy red panda when she experiences strong emotion, something that starts happening about the time she turns 13.

It has quite a cringy start, which I didn't like, but it does have some genuinely funny moments, and while I felt that it mostly ticked off the usual coming-of-age themes, it wasn't too heavy-handed with them (except perhaps the "overbearing mother behaves thus because she couldn't never keep up with her mother's expectations" trope). You have to not think too hard about the plot, though, or it starts making less sense. ( spoilers )

This is a sequel to 2019's Black Panther, and has to deal with the unexpected death of Chadwick Boseman, who played T'Challa / Black Panther in that film. Rather than recast the role, instead Wakanda Forever opens with people grieving T'Challa's death, and other countries sensing weakness in Wakanda and trying to exploit this to get hold of vibranium. The way that Ramonda (suddenly made queen) and Shona (who couldn't cure her brother's terminal illness) respond to their grief makes a significant difference to the plot.

As well as grief, there's a heavy theme of colonialism and its long-lasting impact here, and I think it's good that we largely see it from the point of view of the (formerly-)colonised peoples.

All of which means there is some emotional and thematic weight to go with some pretty good action set pieces. The weakness, though, relates to the plot around the Talokan civilisation( spoilers )Overall, then, a bit of a mixed bag.

This is the last of the films off this year's Hugo Award shortlist. There is a very complex time-travel plot here, which I think doesn't in fact stand up at all, but there are a series of delightful (and delightfully silly) action sequences (a number of which we see twice) which try and keep you from thinking too hard about the plot. It's trying very hard to do a bunch of clever stuff, but doesn't stick the landing. Also, some of the dialogue is a bit hard to make out, which is an error in a film that is already pretty confusing! ( Some spoilers )