The Fritzes 2020: Audience Choice Voting

The form to cast your vote for Audience Choice is at the bottom of this post.

On 09 FEB 2020, scifiinterfaces.com is announcing awards for interfaces in a 2019 science fiction feature film. An “Audience Choice” will also be announced, and determined by the results of the poll, below. What is your selection? You should see the movies in full, but you can see reminder videos and summaries for each of the nominees, below.

Ad Astra

Sometime in the near future, Roy McBridge heads to Mars to find his father and see if he is responsible for immense electrical surges that have been damaging the earth. His journey is troubled by murderous moon pirates, frenzied space baboons, Roy’s unexpected emotions, and the aforementioned surges.

Alita: Battle Angel

The year is 2563. After doctor Ido revives a mysterious cyborg girl from a junkyard, she discovers he is a bounty hunter for evil rogue cyborgs and wants to be one. After she finds a new superpowered body, she is able to save her friend Hugo by turning him into a cyborg, too. With his new abilities, he tries to scale a cable to the forbidden floating city Zalem, but dies. The movie concludes with Alita committing herself to vengeance.

Avengers: Endgame

Avengers: Endgame is an indie feelgood about a group of friends who go rock hunting together. Just kidding, of course. Endgame is the biggest box-office movie of all time, earning 2.67 billion USD worldwide and bringing to climax 11 years of filmmaking in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. The story happens after Infinity War, where Thanos performed “the snap” that disintegrated half of all life in the universe. Endgame sees the remaining Avengers build a time travel device in order to “undo” the snap, defeat Thanos, and along the way resolve some longstanding personal arcs.

Captive State

After an alien occupation, most of humanity falls in line with the oppressors. But not everyone. Captive State tells the story of a resistance movement bent on freeing humanity and saving the earth from ruthless alien capitalists.

High Life

High Life is certainly the most unusual film among the nominees. Convicts in the far future are sentenced to find a new energy source traveling into a black hole. On route to their certain death, sex is forbidden, but they find release in a Holodeck-style masturbatorium called The Box. Meanwhile, there are power struggles and murders and intense sexual situations. 

I am Mother

A robot raises a child from embryo to young woman in a mysterious underground facility. As the human explores more of her world, she learns dark truths about the facility, her life, and the robot she’s come to know as Mother.

Men in Black: International

The Men in Black franchise got new life in 2019 with the release of Men in Black: International. In it a young woman named Molly charms her way into the MIB, only to join Agent H on a mission to forestall an invasion by the hideous but beautiful race called the Hive. On the way, they uncover a mole in the organization while Molly helps H overcome a dark event from his past.

Spider-Man: Far from Home

In the second 2019 nominee movie from the MCU, Peter Parker fails to have a normal summer studying abroad in Europe. He witnesses what he thinks are elemental monsters wreaking havoc on popular tourist cities, and a new superhero named Mysterio fighting them. Over the course of the film, Parker and his Scoobys discover the terrible truth before defeating and exposing the real bad guy. In the end, Parker learns to accept Tony Stark’s legacy, and then has his secret identity rudely outed.

X-Men Dark Phoenix

Superhero movies are not known for their restraint. Dark Phoenix starts with our mutant team rushing into space to, oh, you know, rescue some astronauts, and Jean Gray absorbing a “mysterious space force” in order to save the day. Over the movie, she finds her psychic and telekinetic powers amplified, but ultimately out of her control. She is hunted by the U.S. military, an alien race called the D’Bari, a Magneto gang, and even her own team, to no avail.


Of those movies, which do you think had the best over all interfaces? Cast your vote below. To avoid flagrant ballot stuffing, you must have a google account and be logged in to that account to cast your vote.

Voting will be open until 01 FEB 2020, 23:59 PST.

Please share this post on your social media to get the vote out! Thanks!

The Fritzes 2020: Nominees

This year scifiinterfaces is going to try something new: Giving out awards for the best interfaces in a movie in the prior calendar year. The timing will roughly correspond to the timing of the Oscars.

It’s going to be an “alpha” release version, mind you, since I don’t have a sponsor lined up, and you always have stuff to figure out the first time you try a massive project, and it’s hard to rally collaborators around a new thing. So, the “award” will be virtual, even though the honor is real. Also everything will happen via this blog and social media rather than any live stage event or anything like that. I have tried to do this on a larger scale in the past, but each time something stood in the way. Wish me luck.

The idea here is to reward and encourage excellence and maybe help readers discover what awesomeness is happening in sci-fi interfaces, without going into the full-scale, scene-by-scene critique that normally occupies this blog. The Oscars give awards for “Achievement in production design,” but this often entails much more than the very specific craft of sci-fi interfaces, which is the focus of this project.

On the name

The award will be called the Fritz, in honor of Fritz Lang, who was the first filmmaker to put realistic interfaces in a sci-fi film, specifically his 1927 film Metropolis. Lang was grappling with the larger role of technology in society, and his interfaces are wonderfully evocative and illustrative. Naming the awards after him honors his pioneering spirit and craft.

4 Awards

Sci-fi films have to answer to many masters, and rather than just give one award, I’m going to go with 4. Two of these will respect films that err towards either believability or spectacle—I believe there is often a wicked tradeoff between the two. The main award will honor films that manage that extraordinary challenge of accomplishing both. The fourth award is a viewer’s choice, where I share all the nominees and ask readers (like you) which they think is the best.

  1. Best interfaces (overall)
  2. Best narrative
  3. Best believable
  4. Audience Choice

Perhaps in the future there will be other categories, like for shorts, student work, or television serials. But for now just these four are going to tax the resources of your lone hobbyist blogger, here. Especially as I try to keep up regular reviews.

I will have the help of a few other judges. (I’m still chatting with them now to see if they want to be named. The Academy stays anonymous, so maybe these judges, should, too?) Winners will be announced the week of 09 Feb 2020.

What gets considered?

Focusing efforts on a narrower category of media helps the task be manageable, which is important since a new program cannot rely on submissions from others. I have loosely followed the Academy’s guidelines for eligibility for feature-length films (over 40 minutes), with the exception that I included feature-length films released on streaming media as well, such as those produced by Amazon and Netflix, which never saw theatrical release.

These guidelines gave the judges a list of 27 candidates to consider, and the following are the final nominees, presented in their category in alphabetical order. Keep in mind that the nominees were elected for the quality of the interfaces in the context of the film, but with specific disconsideration for other aspects of the work. In other words, a film could be panned for nearly any other reason, but its interfaces just marvelous, and it could wind up a nominee.

Nominees: Best believable

Nominees: Best narrative

Nominees: Best interfaces (overall)

Congratulations to all the nominees. Nice work.

If you’re the sort who likes to see all the nominees in a category to justify your outrage at the results, get to watching. You have a few weeks to see or re-see these before results are shared.

Stay tuned to scifiinterfaces.com here or on twitter for more, including when and where to vote for Viewer’s Choice.