The Fritzes award honors the best interfaces in a full-length motion picture in the past year. Interfaces play a special role in our movie-going experience, and are a craft all their own that does not otherwise receive focused recognition.
Today we’ll be covering Best Interfaces. The movies nominated for Best Interfaces manage the extraordinary challenge of being believable and helping to paint a picture of the world of the story. They advance the state of the art in telling stories with speculative technology.
The winner of the Best Interfaces award for 2025 is Section 31.
As you’ll read below, my posts on the winner will be a series rather than a single post, so let me do one Also Check Out here.
Bust first, also check out: Superman
Though I have some issues with the amount of fuigetry in most of the screens, and how Lex has to call out countermoves rather than have an assistant offer next most likely countermoves; the robots in the Fortress of Solitude and the crazy-cool gestural control of his spheres by Mr. Terrific make me think that interfaces and tech will not be an afterthought in DC’s new Gunn era.
(James: reach out and I’ll send you a free copy of my book about assistants, it would have helped with that Luthor interface.)
The 2026 Best Interfaces Award goes to
Star Trek: Section 31
Maybe I was out of the loop, but I don’t recall hearing a lot of buzz about this movie at the time it came out. But when I finally caught it, I was impressed with the breadth, the art direction, and some interfaces of a sort I don’t think I’ve documented before. This year I’m going to honor the winner with an old-school breakdown, interface-by-interface. In this post we’ll start with a general overview, and then move to the Mission Briefer.
Note I try to only describe just enough so the interfaces can be understood, but since this is a cloak-and-dagger spy thriller, it’s still pretty intricate.
Plot overview
In the Mirror Universe of Star Trek, the mostly-good United Federation of Planets doesn’t exist. Instead it has a morally-inverse counterpart called the Terran Empire. Philippa Georgiou became ruler of this evil empire in part by defeating and enslaving the ambitious contender San. Once ascended, she exercised cruelty and ruthlessness until sci-fi shenanigans landed her in Prime Universe (the home universe of the shows), in 2257.
[Here I bypass a lot of stuff that happened in Discovery for the sake of brevity.]
Eventually she takes up an alias as “Madame Veronique du Franc”, proprietor of the pleasure space station Baraam, outside Federation territory. Section 31—essentially the Federation’s black ops—sends a team to blackmail Georgiou to help them intercept a superweapon, which happens to be en route to Baraam in the hands of a shady middleman named Dada Noe.
The team consists of their superstrong “augment” leader Alok Sahar, a mech-suit guy named Zeph, a seductress named Melle, a shape-shifting genius called Quasi, a buttoned-up Federation overseer named Garrett, and Fuzz, a microscopic Nanokin who pilots a teeny tiny spaceship and most often inhabits a black market Vulcan-looking android body.
Using some technologies called Phase Pods, Georgiou successfully separates the superweapon from Noe only to have it intercepted by a masked person also wearing a phase pod. Masked person kills Melle and escapes with the superweapon, but on the way Georgiou learns it is the Godsend, a quadrant-vaporizing weapon she had commissioned when she was Terran Emperor.
Georgiou convinces Sahar to form a partnership to recapture the weapon. They beam to his spaceship above a desolate planet where they interrogate Noe. They learn Noe is from the Mirror Universe, where he administered a facility that housed the Godsend. He hatched a plan to sell it and with the money escape to Prime Universe to retire in peace. His portal is an unknown but routinely opening rift between worlds. He tells them he is scheduled to meet his anonymous buyer when the rift next appears in four hours. He expects that if he does not deliver the weapon to his buyer—and the Terran Empire learns that the Godsend is gone—they will trace it to the rift, surge through, and conquer Prime. At that moment a massive explosion rips through the ship. The computer automatically beams the crew to the surface, but Noe dies in fiery debris. (Narratively convenient, but consider that the ship’s computer knew enough to beam our protagonists to safe, non-fiery-debris places, raising the possibility that it chose to murder Noe.)
Sahar says the explosion was sabotage by someone working with the still-unknown Godsend thief. One of them is a mole! Accusations fly, but Garrett focuses them on finding a derelict garbage scow she knows about, as a means to continue their mission. The team splits. Georgiou, Quasi, and Fuzz search for the scow. Sahar, Garette, and Zeph work to repair an antenna in an old Section 31 safehouse so they can warn the Federation of the impending danger.
Team Scow repairs the ship. We see Fuzz behaving a little strangely.
Meanwhile Zeph skips out on Team Antenna. While Sahar and Garrett search for him, the antenna gets activated, some message sent, and then the antenna is destroyed. The whole team rejoins and begins a search for Zeph. They find him dead. When they recover the video from his mech suit, they see something was controlling his suit and made him kill himself. Georgiou reasons that the mole must be Fuzz, who left his Vulcanbot on autopilot while he flew to Zeph to hook in and control him to commit the crimes and fly back to his bot. Thusly busted, Fuzz takes remote control of Zeph’s suit (grossly with Zeph’s corpse still in it) and the two try to escape on a float. The rest of the crew pursues in a second float, and there’s a vehicle combat sequence. Fuzz tells Georgiou that he’s been working with San. Then San beams Fuzz up to his ship. San speeds toward the rift to tell the Empire everything and begin the invasion. The remaining team gets the scow running and gives chase.
They catch up near the rift and the scow tries to delay its entry into the rift via tractor beam. Sahar and Georgiou beam to San’s ship to learn that San has initiated the Godsend. San fights Georgiou. Sahar fights Vulcanbot while Fuzz escapes to watch from a safe distance. On board the scow, Garrett forges a makeshift weapon in the ship’s hold and they release it at San’s ship. It lands and explodes, giving the heroes the upper hand in their respective fights. Georgiou grabs and activates the Godsend via biometric signature. Quasi manages to beam her and Sahar back to the scow just in time, leaving San, Fuzz, Vulcanbot, and the Godsend to be destroyed in the explosion as it passes back to the Mirror Universe and seal the rift forever. (And, presumably, something about the confluence of energies neuters the Godsend so it doesn’t go on to kill quadrillions in the quadrant where the rift happened to be, because that would be multiple, multiple genocides and sully whatever victory this is.)
The movie ends with the team back on the Baraam. They meet Wisp, Fuzz’ widow, piloting a second bootleg Vulcanbot. They receive a mission briefing that has them warping the Baraam (surprise, it’s also a spaceship) towards Turkana IV.
Whew.
Star Trek: Section 31 is primarily set in the 24th-century “Lost Era” between 2324–2326. This places it roughly 66 years after Discovery (2258) and about 40 years before The Next Generation. For continuity, the designers have to find some middle ground between the glowing, 3D, multiplanar translucency of Disco and the flat, 2D, highly-graphic, vibrant oranges-and-blues palette of LCARS. I think they did a really nice job. We see circular, glowing interfaces. We see hints of the fully realized LCARS to come.
There’s also a clear delineation between Federation/Section 31 interfaces, the mining colony interfaces, the few Terran Empire interfaces we see, and those of the foreign-language garbage scow.
San’s ship interior, by the way, is high-contrast red-on-black, and very pointy, making me wonder if the production designers have read my post on the Design of Evil, because it is practically an archetype of those patterns.
Anyway, now that we have a grasp on the plot, next let’s look more closely at those interfaces.
IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9603060/Currently streaming on: 
Next up: The mission briefer
