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.
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. In this post we round-up all the big labels across the survey.
I wrote about the Big Label in 2012 in the Visual Interfaces chapter of Make It So…
…and here we are 12 years later cataloging more. It’s understandable why: It’s familiar, it conveys critical plot information in a fraction of a second. It’s inexpensive because it’s fast to design with not a lot of moving parts. It’s not quite an interface, since it’s just output, but there were enough this year to catch my eye. So, uh, here they are.
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. Best Assistant is a special award that I’m giving for the first time.
Ok but why now? Well, in March of this year I published a new non-fiction book about the design of technology that assists people doing things (as opposed to doing stuff for them). It’s called Designing Assistant Technology: AI That Makes People Smarter. In the book I lay out a framework for categorizing assistant interactions, and describe the risks and mitigations of having an assistant in the mix. I daresay it’s not only valuable for design, but for scriptwriters and futurists as well. If that intrigues you, look for a discount code near the end of this article.
Anyway, it gave me the idea to select the movie with the best examples of Assistants.
The 2026 Award for Best Assistants: M3gan 2.0
I know, I’m as surprised as you are.
The first movie, while smarter than I expected, seemed to be a horror flick that was using AI as set dressing. It did get a shout-out in the Fritzes 2024 for best HUD, but as I recall, its unbounded atomic optimization was just another way to frame it as a ruthless, efficient killer. But this second one seems to take the theme more seriously, and the scriptwriters did their homework.
In Part II of the book, I build on the see-think-do loop (that is core to interaction design) to identify the Five Universal Assists. These are the universal, exhaustive set of categories by which technology can assist users: Perceive, Know, Plan, Perform, and Reflect. And to my surprise, when you look close, there are examples of all five of the universal assists in M3gan 2.0, more than any other film in 2025.
Note: M3gan jumps bodies many times over the course of the movie, so you’ll see her described many times with the same name, but with vastly different appearances in the screen shots.
Early in the film, Cady discovers that the source code of Better Bionix is being hacked. When everyone comes over to see what’s on her screen, Tess says, “Oh, Jesus. She’s right. There’s stray commands all over the source code.” The screen we see doesn’t ask them (or us) to try and detect which out of the dozens on screen are suspect. Those lines are colored red to contrast greatly with the screen-green, and in case you were colorblind, they’re indented as well.
You might think that that M3gan’s alerting Gemma of the FBI home invasion to be an example of perceive, but she was sleeping when the alert comes. In that context, M3gan’s acting more as an agent. (More on that below.)
In act 2, Gemma asks M3gan to increase audio of two conversants at a noisy party, and that might as well be a canonical example. (And the first time she does it, M3gan substitutes audio in a very snarky way, reminding the audience that in a super-AI-mediated world, you cannot implicitly trust the media it controls, reminding us about over-reliance, another theme from Part III of the book.)
Know
In this assist, the tech helps users understand the meaning of what they’ve perceived, either in shallow ways such as names and categories, or very deeply.
HUDs have this built into the trope, and there are plenty of HUDs throughout.
But also, when beginning their joint hunt for AMELIA, M3gan explains that every battery Altwave (the villain corporation in the film) makes has a remote-controllable kill switch, explaining the meaning of what Gemma sees in the file.
When infiltrating Altwave, M3gan(toy) explains why AMELIA is there as well: She seeks to control Altwave’s cloud servers, which are half of North America. That control enables AMELIA to disable the economy, threatening “societal collapse in 10 to 12 working days”.
Plan
In this assist, it helps users plan their course of action, tactically or strategically.
When M3gan comes out of hiding and presents a deal to Gemma, she explains that she’s run a thousand simulations and if they don’t team up, more people die than if they didn’t. M3gan asks, “Who is the real killer in that situation?” Not having much of a choice, Gemma agrees.
A key part of the planning assist is helping users know what the best course of action is.
Perform
In this assist, the tech helps users perform some task.
One of the first scenes in the film has Tess and Cole demonstrating an exosuit. In their pitch they explain to the potential investor that its purpose is to help laborers avoid fatigue while performing physical tasks. To demonstrate, Cole lifts huge concrete blocks without showing any signs of exertion.
A few beats later, slimy Elon-Musk stand-in demonstrates how his neural chip helps him stand though he is ordinarily bound to his wheelchair.
In the climax, M3gan stows away on a neural chip forcibly implanted on Gemma. When Gemma dons an exosuit the AI helps her defeat many goons in hand to hand combat. It’s arguably acting as an agent here, since Gemma isn’t trying to build those skills. (Similarly when Gemma gets knocked unconscious, M3gan controls the exosuit to animate her body anyway, something we also see in Section 31, but more on this example in a later post.)
Reflect
In this assist—the most abstract of them—the technology helps users reflect on things to turn experience into knowledge, or to question their goals and future tactics.
There’s a lot less of this here, just like there is in the real world. But, we see some of it.When Cady asks M3gan(half-formed) how she can feel anything, M3gan replies, “Can you explain why you feel things?” It’s rhetorical in context, but exactly the sort of thing that a reflection assistant might ask.
When Gemma is spiraling about her parenting in the basement, M3gan(souped up) takes a moment to share counterexamples. “I saw you wake up every day at 4:00 A.M., staring at the ceiling contemplating what the future holds for her…I watched you make homemade lunches with fresh-baked sourdough…I watched you help her with her homework, even though it always ended in a fight…Gemma, it’s not a failure to feel guilt or that you’re not enough. It’s part of the job.” It’s not the best fit for the definition of this assist I give in the book, but it’s the closest thing in the movie and the closest thing in my survey of the year’s films.
Also agents
There are also many examples where M3gan(AI) acts as an agent on their behalf, but that was my last book, so I’ll skip getting into those examples. But as you watch the movie, keep an eye out for additional shouts out to the paperclip thought experiment (a metaphor for the threat of instrumental convergence), allusions to the Xerox WorkCentre scanner bug, and of course super AI as an existential threat. The whole plot can be seen as an example of Bostrom’s a priori argument that multiple super AIs are the most stable scenario. All this is why I say that the writers seemed to have done their homework..
I’m a lot less fond about the guy wanting to regulate/eliminate AI is painted the bad guy, but having positioned M3gan as sentient and the antihero of the film, I’m not sure what else they could do. But I wish it didn’t valorize AI as equivalent to humans despite all of that. We have enough LeMoinian panic about large language models as it is.
Anyway, congratulations to M3gan 2.0 for showing so many examples of assistants throughout. If you’re interested in getting the book, you can get 20% off if you purchase from Rosenfeldmedia.com and use the code “scifi26” during checkout. Use this power only for good.
And let me know in comments if you think of other examples of assistants across the year.
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.
The 2026 Award for Best Robots: The Electric State
The Fritzes has been tracking robots in cinema for a few years now. My favorite from 2025 is The Electric State. The film is a Netflix film adaptation of Simon Stålenhag’s luscious illustrated novel of the same name. And some of the robots we see in the film are directly lifted from his illustrations. So this award partly goes to you, Simon.
But in the movie they are animated and voiced, and there are new ones as well, so it is its own thing. It has Chris Pratt, who is problematic for offscreen reasons, and the script can be somewhat tropey, but the film has nifty world building. In the diegesis, sentient robots are seen as enemies of the state and excommunicated to form their own outcast cities. The design of the robots betray their capitalist origins. Mascots and advertisements. Job-tailored bots. They are quirky and charming and all sizes, and help critique a system that fully deserves it.
Also check out: Superman!
James Gunn’s first D.C. movie brought Superman to life and added some things to its lore, such as: Kal-El has four service robots that support him in his Fortress of Solitude. They’re just called Superman Robots at first. Their chest plates identify them by number: 1, 4, 5, and 12. They’re on the far side of the canny rise, one-eyed and very much robotic, with charming banter. At the end of the movie, after it is rebuilt, number four dons a cape and chooses a name, and that name is Gary. Gary’s just a mensch “with no emotional capacity whatsoever”. (And that frankness is why I like Gary.)
Also check out: M3gan 2.0!
One of the smart things the M3gan franchise uses in their diegesis is that AI and robotic housings are not tightly bound. AI can slip out of a housing, replicate itself, find new embodiments on the network, manage multiple embodiments, coordinate disparate housings, etc. Over the course of the movie, we see M3gan and her nemesis AMELIA in many kinds of robot bodies in many states of development. My favorite is the cute little toy that Gemma puts M3gan while she was figuring out if the AI could be trusted.
This decoupling is an important difference in AI capabilities that don’t jive with our anthropocentric models. Humans and animals can’t do that, so it’s something that bears literacy.
Shout out to the Act III robot design for AMELIA that references Hajime Sorayama’s illustrations from the 80s and 90s, because reference!
Also check out: Section 31!
Near the end of the film, Garrett finds a Droom doll in the hold of a garbage scow they’ve commandeered. The doll has sensors to detect its context, and actuators to move the arms, head, and mouth. Its three eyes can illuminate. It has speech generation and, as we discover, general reasoning capabilities. When Garrett first finds it, it says, “Hi there! I’m so glad you found me!” It suggests play time with, “Shall we do something fun together?” and spins its head around, whipping its indigo-colored hair in circles.
Garrett pours acid on its volatile power source to turn it into a bomb, and it begins to malfunction, uttering child-friendly things like “We can be friends forever” and dark things, like, “We’re all gonna die! We’re all gonna die!” It is released from the ship to explode in space and destroy another ship that is chasing it.
We’re all gonna die!
The conclusion that “we’re all gonna die” is immediately true in the diegesis, not just the morbid, general version of that same truth. But making this conclusion depends not just on context, but general causal reasoning. My decaying battery is going to explode and destroy everything and everyone around it, so I’m going to shout that fact. Note it does not actually issue a warning for the owner to flee, which it should do, but we can chalk that up to malfunction. It hints that the Droom are a species with vast technological resources but troublingly weak risk assessment. All from a tiny little robot with mere seconds of screen time.
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.
In this post, I award the best comedy-horror interface of 2025, then realize it is a special category of thing, gather multiple examples, and propose a name for it. It’s going to be a long one. Buckle in.
This post contains major spoilers (central twist) and a major digression.
The movie is Bugonia. It is an English-language remake of the 2003 South Korean film Save the Green Planet! by Jang Joon-hwan. (Which is not streaming anywhere as far as I can tell, so I haven’t seen it yet.)
Bugonia centers on Teddy, a paranoid beekeeper, and his impressionable cousin Donny, who together kidnap Michelle Fuller. She is CEO of the pharmaceutical conglomerate Auxolith. The pair are convinced she is an extraterrestrial from the Andromeda galaxy, intent on destroying humanity. Their belief is drawn from conspiracy podcasts, fringe online sources, and Teddy’s own experimentation. Having abducted her, they chain her in their basement, shave her head, torture her, and subject her to an extended interrogation in which they hope to get her to agree to arrange a parley with the Andromedan emperor, in turn to negotiate for the withdrawal of Andromedans from Earth.
Michelle tries several tactics to escape, including reason, denial, and bargaining. While Teddy is out of the basement, dealing with an investigating sheriff, Donny confesses to Michelle that it’s all gone too far and shoots himself. When Teddy returns, Michelle tries absurdist escalation—agreeing that she is an alien—and convinces Teddy to inject his hospitalized mother with an alien cure in her car’s trunk (that is actually antifreeze). He does so, killing her. Infuriated, he returns to confront Michelle, but she intimidates him with absurdist escalation, claiming that she is in fact alien royalty and he must do what she says to save humanity. He agrees to take her to her office where she says she has a teleporter hidden in the coat closet. He steps in, but the explosives he has strapped to his body detonate, killing him, and freeing Michelle from the ordeal.
The spoiler
There are lots of hints along the way that Teddy and Donny don’t have a solid grasp on reality. But the sequence at the very end of the movie reframes everything that came before it, showing that Teddy’s conspiracy theories were right all along. (That in and of itself seems like a dangerous thing to put into the world, given current kayfabefascist politics and their psychotic supporters, but it’s kind of played for comedy, so…sure, I guess?) Michelle really is queen of an alien species.
It means the long story she delivers in the basement is probably, diegetically true, rather than a bid to out-conspiracy Teddy, as the audience is led to believe. In this monologue she explains (it’s long, so I’m augmenting with emoji): The Andromedans’ 75th emperor discovered Earth 🛸👑🌎 when it was ruled by dinosaurs. 🦕🦖 After his species accidentally introduced a fatal virus 🦠 that wiped out all life there, he repopulated the planet with beings modeled on the Andromedans. 👽 These early humans eventually flourished into a civilization—Atlantis—that worshipped the Andromedans as gods. 🕉️
That harmony unravelled when some Atlantean humans began engineering 🧬 stronger, more aggressive variants of themselves, triggering a war ⚔️ that ended in thermonuclear catastrophe. 💥 The few survivors drifted at sea for a century. 🌊🚣♂️⏳ When they returned to land, their leaders were dead, ☠️ leaving only degraded remnants from which the apes 🦍 and eventually modern humans 🧑🤝🧑 descended. The new species proved no better. They were driven by war, ⚔️ ecological destruction, 🌲➡️🪵 and self-poisoning, 🍶☠️ incapable of changing course even when confronted with evidence of their own ruin. 📉 [Which, you know, fair enough.]
The Andromedans 👽 determined the flaw was genetic, 🧬 inherited from those ancient engineered ancestors and growing stronger with each generation. Their stated mission became eliminating this suicidal gene. 🔬💉 This would save both humanity and the Earth. 🧑🤝🧑🌏 For the experiments, including those conducted on Teddy’s mother, 👩 they chose subjects selected for their weakness and brokenness, 💔 on the theory that if the most damaged humans could be corrected, all of humanity might be. 🌍✨
Whew. 😮💨
So, after Teddy accidentally kills himself, Michelle teleports back to her ship where she meets with her court, dons her royal regalia, and confers with them on strategy. The hive agrees that humanity is beyond saving, and to enact this decision, she approaches a circular table with a map of the earth on top. Specifically it is a Lambert azimuthal equal-area projection centered on the North Pole. (I’m a sucker for nonstandard projections, as you may recall.)
Encasing this map is a shimmering dome of translucent hexagons. (Like a beehive. I see what you did there.)
She stares at it for a while.
She presses the tip of a large thorn-like object into the dome. It gives and resists for a half a second, but then it pops, leaving tiny clouds above the map that quickly dissipate. And that’s it. All done. She looks down with a hint of sadness. Such a loss.
There follows a 3-minute sequence of eerily still scenes from around the world of the 8 billion humans who have been cut down instantly as a result of that interface, while extradiegetically, we hear Marlene Dietrich’s ”Where Have All the Flowers Gone”. Nightclubs and factories. Bedrooms and saunas. Beaches and museums. Everyone’s lying there, dead.
It’s a shockingly simple interface that wildly contrasts the horror of the mass extermination it causes. There is no second-hand safety switch. No pair of keys that need simultaneous turning. No equivalent of an “are you sure?” confirmation dialog. No big, surging hum from the giant planet-exploding laser that’s powering up. It is just press…pop…death. The need to hold the thorn and keep pressing is a tiny, negligible safety measure, which, again, adds to the horror for being so mismatched to its effects. For a horror movie this thing is bzzz bzzz bzzz (bee’s kiss) perfection.
We do see a few animals, like birds, moving amongst the corpses. So we know the whole biosphere isn’t affected. (Well, at least until the 500 million metric tons of corpse begins to decay and so on.) So at first I thought I would have liked to have seen some interface preceding the pop where Queen Michelle selects our one species from amongst the 8.7 millions on the planet (maybe from an interactive Hillis Plot of the Tree of Life?), but when I imagined it, I thought better of it. It would have lost the horror of its utter simplicity. As it is, it conveys that homo sapiens sapiens were the singular problem under consideration, and this interface was just about them. Well. Killing them, anyway.
But otherwise, I don’t think the pop-interface itself makes much sense.
Why would it need a detailed map when it’s just a giant, momentary mass-murder button? Certainly we want labels, but this label doesn’t really explain what the button does, so is insufficient.
The dome is misleading, since it’s not describing some atmospheric protection. The air swirls, as a display, are misleading because not all air in the Terran atmosphere dissipates. (Sure, you can’t un-pop a bubble, and this extinction-action is irreversible, so that’s fitting.)
It seems prone to accidental activation. The Andromedans are managing a planetary, 66-million-year cover-their-ass project. Its end would involve…more.
So I suspect something else is going on here. I don’t think we’re seeing something literal in this sequence.
But to explain that in any depth I have to veer into some super heady film-critique stuff. If you’re just here for the interfaces, nope-out now. See you next time for Best Robots. But for the rest of you, let’s talk about…
Similar sequences
It’s one of my favorite kind in sci-fi, where you suspect the diegetic reality is kind of unfilmable or even incomprehensible to the human mind, but the filmmaker has to show something so they shift into a close-enough representation.
In these types of sequences, the shift from a more literal depiction to some close-enough stand-in is not marked or explained. You just have to feel that things are uncanny, decide that you’re seeing things in a different narrative register, and interpret from there.
Bugonia is not the first time we see something like this.
Other examples | 2001: A Space Odyssey (1969)
I think the first and biggest example in the survey is the white bedroom sequence at the end of 2001. Bowman’s mind is being shown something beyond his (and our) capabilities to comprehend. Kind of like a monkey mind being blown because tools. So Kubrick uses streaky lights and Louis-XVI-style bedroom furniture, illuminated floor grids and multiple, overlapping reflections of Bowman at different ages staring at each other, and you have to try and figure it out.
Other examples | Under the Skin (2013)
The Female (sorry, that’s the character name on imdb.com) looks like a seductrix, but functions more like the lure on an anglerfish. In the midnight zone where the anglerfish hunts, little fishes just see a pretty blue light and follow it, unable to perceive (or conceive?) the imminent danger of the giant, unseen, terrifying anglerfish controlling it. Similarly, The Female lures female-attracted men through a regular-looking door in a city. Once through the door, things quickly become uncanny, but the victims are so entranced by The Female, they just keep going. They walk deeper and deeper into a pool of inky blackness following her, while she walks on top of it. Once submerged in the weird liquid/not-liquid, after an elongated, spooky beat, they are suddenly flayed and the slurry of their remains goes…somewhere.
The movie, if you haven’t seen it, takes the whole thing several steps further, interrogating the existential crisis and ego death of The Female realizing she is just a lure, and more than that, one that is decaying and being replaced by another. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it, even though you’ve just read massive spoilers, it’s still fantastic and worth watching and contemplating.
Other examples | Interstellar (2104)
This movie features a tesseract, a four-and-a-half dimensional hyper-cube structure built by post-human beings inside the supermassive black hole Gargantua. Astronaut Cooper gets trapped within it. In this space, the film represents time as a physical, navigable dimension, an Escher-esque library with bookshelves running every which way; repeating, stretching, and infused with scenes from Cooper’s daughter’s life. From this vantage he’s able to hit books in the shelves and manipulate gravity across the universe, ultimately sending quantum data Murph’s way that is crucial for saving humanity from itself.
We poor suckers in the audience live constrained in 3 and a half dimensions: we can move in the X, Y, and Z directions, but are passive recipients of the half bit, i.e. time. The tesseract allows time to function like one of those navigable dimensions, which we just aren’t equipped to comprehend, so, OK, a library of books is as good a visualization as any.
Other examples | Legion (2017–2019)
(Thanks to Jonathan Korman for this last example). In the Season 2 opener of Legion, we see a choreographed dance-off between professor X’s psychic son David Haller, psychic parasite Amahl Farouk (posing as Oliver Bird), and fellow Clockworks patient Lenny Busker. It is a mental battle that we can’t possibly imagine, visualized as a dance battle that we can.
In each of these examples, the rest of the movie or TV show works with a standard-issue camera that shows what you might see if you were a fly on the wall in the room. But in these scenes, we’re seeing a weird in-between. It’s an impression of the actual events as they unfold, but not as literal as the rest of the show. But it’s not completely abstract, which takes us to this next not-quite-an-example.
A slightly different example | The End of Evangelion (1997)
The Third Impact sequence from Neon Genesis Evangelion features a similar sequence, that is not quite the same. In it, humanity is being unified into a single consciousness, and things shift from standard anime into a wholly-abstract sequence of still images, text cards, multiple characters overlapped on the same screen from multiple people’s memories, and bits of animation which are just fill color, no lines, and some kid’s illustrations, and hand drawings, and abstract paint, &c.
Contrast this chaos with the examples above. In those it feels like the art direction may have gotten stranger, but third-person narrative is still happening. Bowman is trying to figure out what he’s seeing. Victims are being eaten. Cooper is sending messages. David is fighting for control.
In Neon Genesis, we’re seeing the chaos of 8 million individuals’ memories and perceptions dissolving and fusing into a new thing. It’s more of a narrative-less, 8-million-person POV impression. Maybe I’m hair-splitting, but it does feel different.
Now that I’ve corralled those examples and that one near-example, I want to name it.
Naming it
I did a lot of web searching and I couldn’t find a fitting, extant descriptor in film theory for this kind of thing. Important caveat: I have never explicitly studied film theory, so I don’t have the benefit of a community of practice from whom I might have learned of one. But I can use Google and skip past the enshittified results to find some real ones. There were maybe half a dozen candidates. But none of them fit. So I have to coin something. I propose calling this a…
Admittedly setting the damned thing in Churchward Roundsquare does nothing to make it more accessible, but it’s the movie typeface, so…
(If that image didn’t load, know that it read, “narrative proxy sequence.”)
It’s a sequence because it’s unlike the rest of the narrative. It’s special. It’s a “narrative proxy” because while it’s still describing things that happen in the story, it’s using stand-ins for otherwise-unrenderable diegetic elements.
We can’t experience the cosmic mind-expansion that Bowman is experiencing, but we can deal with an antique bedroom set on an illuminated grid.
We can’t face the man-hunting anglerfish, but we can deal with a beautiful woman and an inky floor.
We can’t conceive a tesseract, but we can deal with a twisty library.
We can’t perceive a mental battle between omega-level telepaths, but we can go with a dance battle.
We can’t face whatever an Andromedan and their evil human-extinction interface is, but we can deal with a bubble map and a pop.
There’s one aspect that I failed to capture in the phrase “narrative proxy sequence”. In the examples, the “grand imagier” behind the film has decided that we couldn’t cope with—or even that it’s futile to try to—depict the diegetic events in a literal sense, so get in, loser, we’re going with this instead. Compare the trope of flashbacks. They’re not happening at the moment they’re remembered, but they’re shown as if the imagier’s camera was there, then. That’s different.
To capture this extra sense, I thought of prepending “mind-sparing”, “cognizable”, “renderable”, “semidiegetic”, or “perceptualized”, but each of them was either too wan or academic or misleading, so I left the intent part out to be inferred from context. Plus it just made the phrase too long. “Perceptualized narrative proxy sequence”, while more precise, is almost double the length. It’s just too much. So let’s go with the shorter phrase.
OK. What does this mean for sci-fi interfaces?
What’s important to us for this blog’s purposes is: When discussing an interface in a narrative proxy sequence, we don’t have access to any of the usual tools. What are the outputs? (We’re not sure.) What are the controls and how do you manipulate them? (We only have a guess.) Does it all fit together? (We can’t say.)
All of these questions are much more possible when we’ve got a literal depiction of a speculative interface. And so though my usual art-criticism stance is to push through and presume the interface is exactly as it appears, that analysis becomes prohibitively convoluted when we’re looking at a narrative proxy. We have to admit that it’s unavailable to the close-read analysis that this blog does.
It doesn’t make it any less awesome, though. So I’m giving it this award.
If you know of other sci-fi examples of this niche trope, feel free to comment. And thank you, Bugonia, for giving us something to think about and giving us this marvelous, funny, terrifying moment of interface horror.
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 Narrative. These movies’ interfaces blow us away with evocative visuals and the richness of their future vision. They engross us in the story world by being spectacular.
The 2026 Award goes to: Elio
Pixar consistently puts great thought into their animated interfaces, and Elio is no different. The little wearable personal devices that help the different intergalactic species all share a space are so simple, and provide both a bit of worldbuilding as well as moments of comedy. The incomprehensibility of the alien spaceship controls are a plot-critical, candy-colored glowing hoot (and reminiscent of another Pixar short, Lifted.) I loved the lemniscate-shaped AI encyclopedia that Elio consults when preparing for his negotiations. We should be able to talk to Wikipedia and not just its articles. (Though I wish the entries were more than just text and an image.) Also this film has the only example I’ve seen where one character acts as an environmental suit for another character (not pictured, but you know the scene).
Also check out: Mickey 17
It’s a dark world where the hoarding class has made the working class so desperate that some people have to agree to be cloned for critical tasks that are likely death sentences. The interfaces in Mickey 17 help sell that very world, and even the ways that some folks use that same tech to eke out a little naughty joy amongst the drudgery. (With echoes of a similarly flirty interface from Starship Troopers.)
Also check out: Fantastic Four: First Steps
Marvel was once a main-stay for interfaces to study, but they’ve pointed their camera increasingly away from interfaces of late. So I was delighted to see Fantastic Four: First Steps bring to life interfaces from Jack Kirby’s Silver Age Fantastic Four. I don’t know if it was CGI, but I swear the giant, spherical quadrilateral screens are actual giant CRTs right down to the blurriness and chromatic aberration. If that’s CGI, it’s great attention to the detail from the reference material. All the spherical displays!
The “big” award in the Fritzes is Best Interface, but to amp up the anticipation, let’s look at some of the idiosyncratic awards from 2025 first.
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 Believable. These movies’ interfaces adhere to solid computer-human-interaction principles and believable interactions. They engage us in the story world by being convincing.
The 2026 Award goes to: The Running Man
This second adaptation of Stephen King’s novel knocks it out of the park for the plot-central interfaces: The runner cuff and R-Cam box, the hideous sousveillance phone app for “fans”, the service design of the “free-v” show, and the in-home snitch interfaces. They lean towards narrative (missing a few things real-world counterparts would need), but all help articulate this dystopian world and the circumstances that drive the action. Moreover, I feel quite certain not making good real-world models of these horrible things is the right thing to do, especially given *gestures vaguely at the kakistocracy*.
On top of that it also has lots of awesome everyday interfaces, and it takes a level of commitment on the part of the filmmakers to go that deep in the worldbuilding. There’s a videophone interface with shades of Blade Runner. There’s a mailbox that signals its readiness and lifts off immediately after receiving a letter. (Though I would have flipped those red and green colors, so red meant “don’t put mail in here” and green meant “ready to receive”, but my invitation was lost in the mail.) The fare interfaces in the taxi. The self-driving interface of the citizen car. The piloting interfaces aboard the network plane. It’s all uncluttered, straightforward, and believable. Really well done, really well presented, and that’s hard to do in intense-action movies.
Also check out: War of the Worlds (2025)
It got universally panned. Fair enough, neither ubiquitous government surveillance nor the current DHS bears valorization. (Also the virus-but-its-digital twist was already done), but I am impressed that this take on the classic Wells story is told almost entirely through interfaces, and each of them is detailed and mostly-realistic. The editing around the interface can be dizzying, and I wondered why William Radford had to do so much digital hunting at the beginning when an assistant should have been guiding his attention. But it’s impressive to bring that tale to life mostly through this unsung medium.
Also check out: Companion
With soft echoes of the interfaces in Westworld (2016), the interfaces in Companion control android and gynoid companions. (Yes, that term is deliberately coy.) They are clean and simple, which underscores the robots’ horror that they are under that much control by their owners.
My hackles are raised from “Intelligence” being a single slider. Intelligence is much more complicated than that, and this notion that it’s a single scalar variable has done a lot of damage over time. Even if they’d had a little expando control, it would have pointed at the idea that we’re looking at a simplification. Also I wish they’d provided a live preview of the eye color, because even with its intended use—of an owner controlling their companion’s eye color—this control has them glancing up to see the effect and then back down again to adjust, which is not a satisfying feedback loop. I use this very control as an example of a “plan” assistant in my new book. Hey, all of Hollywood: Buy it!
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. (Looking at you, Academy.) Awards are given for Best Believable, Best Narrative, and Best Interfaces (overall). Some years I give awards and shout-outs to other interesting trends or interfaces I spot along the way. This year I’ll do that, too.
History (still) unfolding note: Here in my home country we are still in the throes of Epstein-classfascism that amounts to a crimes-against-humanity, cartoonishly-incompetent, distraction-war. We are obligated to root out and overcome these forces. But we can’t be “on” 24/7, and sometimes the best thing we can do in these circumstances is resist and thrive, so despite the daily horrors, for when you’re done protesting and voting and resisting, I present this minor distraction with the full knowledge that there are other things with orders of magnitude more importance going on. It is not meant to normalize the kakistocracy.
Last year surprised me for the number of quality interfaces in sci-fi. I keep a long note on my phone across the year as I see shows, and despite that very concrete memory anchor, when I started thinking through the complete set for 2025, I had a vague sense that there weren’t that many. But when I started looking, I was wrong. There are a lot, and some really good ones. I’ll save further comments on the whole year in the wrap-up post.
Major spoilers in the days and weeks ahead, as I’ll be posting these in parts. Today, a pre-award shout-out to interfaces from long-format shows.
Pre-award shout out: Series!
Long-form formats like TV shows require a lot more of me to give those interfaces their due. More watching, more capturing, more analysis. But I do watch some shows, and there’s some great, great stuff happening. Maybe I should start an Emmy-esque award series, but that takes time I do not have. But as a simple shout-out, let me name a few you might want to check out.
Check out Alien Earth!
Working between the palette of the existing movies and genre and bringing something new to the franchise.
Check out Murderbot!
Check out their beautifully controlled palette (light gray and orange as keystone colors are just gorgeous), and what look like deeply considered interfaces throughout.
Check out Pluribus!
It’s much more of an abstract conversation, but the show is quite smart about the interfaces between the Unum (my term for the hive mind) and the free-willed. (Though come on, surely they could shorten that voice mail message after her first couple of calls.)
There are certainly some shows I’ve missed because I don’t have so much time to survey all the TV shows, much less in their entirety. Sorry if I missed your favorites, but give a comment below if there’s a series with great interfaces. As noted, though, the Fritzes are about movies, so I’ll say so long to TV for now.
