Last year in January I launched an annual awards program for excellence in cinematic sci-fi interfaces. If you didn’t catch it then, here are the inaugural winners. Then the rest of 2020 happened. A lot of movies were postponed since reasonable audiences were staying out of cinemas during the pandemic.
I’m still going to do the Fritzes this year, formally announcing nominees on 15 MAR and publishing the results on 25 APR (timed with the Oscars), but this post is asking to see if my readership knows (and can recommend) other movies that I might not have heard about. This is because of the movies I saw last year, only 2 (that’s right, two) had interfaces significant enough to evaluate. And one of those only had 1 interface in it. In total. So maybe you know more?
2020 sci-fi movies with negligible-or-no interfaces
Here’s a list of those movies that I watched which had negligible or no interfaces to review. (Note some of these were awful, so this is not a recommendations list, just an accounting.)
- 2067
- Battlefield 2025
- Bill & Ted Face the Music
- Bloodshot
- Color Out of Space (listed as a 2019, but I swear it was a 2020 release)
- Invasion
- Palm Springs
- Possessor
- Save Yourselves!
- Sputnik
- Tenet
- The New Mutants
- Time to Hunt
- Wonder Woman 1984
The ones with some interfaces
Still on my to-watch list
Here’s the list of sci-fi movies I’m aware of that were released in 2020 that I have yet to watch. Now it could be that I’ve just watched things in an unfortunate order, and the ones I watched happened to be the ones without much to review. Maybe (hopefully?) that’s true. But just in case…
- Archive
- Breach
- Jiu Jitsu
- LX 2048
- Minor Premise
- Parallel Minds
- Project Power
- Proximity
- Robot Riot
- Underwater
- Useless Humans
If you have seen any of these and can share with me that they have no or negligible interfaces (and save the 90ish minutes of time) please let me know that, too.
The Ask
So…does anyone know of other 2020 films with great interfaces that I should see? Please let me know on social media or in the comments.
Television addendum
In contrast to the suspiciously-interfaceless moviescape, I’ve seen a lot of great interface work in television. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Expanse, Devs, Lovecraft Country, The Mandalorian, Star Trek Discovery, and Star Trek Picard, to name a few. So much great work. Awarding television shows is some complexity I haven’t ventured into yet, but if I wind up with a paucity of examples in film, I might have to start alternating years for TV & movies. Or start up a new set of awards just for TV.
