Next, we have my nominations and
votes in the "visual" categories: comics, tv, and film. (I have linked the titles
if I have written a review elsewhere, or if the work is freely
available on the Internet.)
Things I Nominated
As I said in my last post, I lost my nominating ballot (if I ever had it), but I am pretty sure I nominated an episode of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds season one, "Spock Amok," for the Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) category.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)
Andor is a Disney Plus show that's a prequel to Rogue One, a film I found overrated—and I have to admit, I don't really remember the character of Andor at all. (Plus, as a Star Trek fan, I find his name confusing.) Normally with shows I don't watch that are Hugo finalists, I just watch the relevant episodes, not any other ones. Sometimes this works (I think both For All Mankind episodes I've seen work great on their own), sometimes it does not (my friend Christiana is always criticizing the scattershot way I viewed The Good Place). This year I acceded to Christiana's advice, which was to not watch all twelve episodes of Andor, but to at least watch the first and sixth before moving onto the two that were Hugo finalists.
This was good advice, in that I had some helpful context, but also bad advice in that I thought the sixth episode, "The Eye," was much better than the two that were actually finalists; had "The Eye" been a finalist, I probably would have ranked it first. "Rix Road"—like most of the Andor episodes I saw—does a great job of building to a dramatic climax, as the inhabitants of an Empire-occupied planet take to the titular road to hold an illegal funeral procession for Andor's mother. But unlike "The Eye" and "One Way Out," I felt like the energy of this dramatic confrontation fizzled rather than exploded; the speech by Andor's mother is good, but then it just kind of ends. So I would put it roughly on a par with "Babylon's Ashes"; I gave a slight edge to The Expanse based on my long-term loyalty to that show.
As I say every year, I stopped watching The Expanse back during season 3, but it's not the show's fault, it's my own. However, I have enough context to follow what's happening because I read all the books, and the show is fairly faithful. That said, I suspect the emotions of the pay-offs of a season finale (series finale?) would come across much more strongly had I watched the preceding episodes. So, yeah, this was fine and had its moments, but if I ever catch up on The Expanse, I think I will like it more. (Bits of it were very sudden, though; it seems pretty crazy that they did the first book in fifteen episodes, but the sixth one in six!)
As always, it is perhaps silly for my only episode of a show to be the season finale, but that's how I (usually) roll. This was okay, I guess, but it more fizzled out than climaxed. Which maybe was on purpose, given the meta gags, but I didn't think those worked terribly well (though I did like how she broke out of her show); my favorite jokes were the ones about Charlie Cox's Daredevil, who put in a completely unexpected appearance. But I was moderately entertained, so fourth place it is.
Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form)
I successfully went fourteen years of my life never having seen Avatar; alas, I was not so lucky with the sequel, which I suffered through in all its inexplicably-three-hour entirety. It seems to me that the entire movie suffers from—among other things—a nonsensical and morally abhorrent premise. That is to say, the main guy, Jake, is a human living as a Na'vi on the planet Pandora, leading its people in a war of resistance against occupying human forces. But early on in the film, he goes on the run because his family is threatened. The problems are: 1) he flees to a place where he has no ability to blend in, among a different race of Na'vi; 2) this is an awful thing for him to do, he's depicted as the only hope they have; 3) the movie then just totally ignores the plight of the Na'vi he abandoned, either because they are okay (which makes no sense) or they are all being slaughtered offscreen (which makes him even worse).
It's all a bit The Word for World Is Forest, isn't it? Yet even though that's one of my least favorite Le Guins, James Cameron could have done a much better job if he had ripped it off more: the thing Le Guin shows in her novels of conflict between colonizer and colonized is that the colonized have to avoid buying into the values of the colonizer. If the Na'vi really offer an alternative to the values of Earth, then why is the only way they can be defended with the values of Earth? That is to say, with overlong fight sequences that could have come straight out of a Marvel movie? At the end of the movie, Jake and his family haven't really accomplished anything at all! So anyway, this was an astounding technical achievement, I guess, but so what? I did like Jemaine Clement's character. If I have to suffer through another, he had better be in it.
This second Black Panther film was basically fine. Some good moments and action and humor, good character work dealing with the death of Chadwick Boseman/T'Challa. Namor from the comics was reworked quite a lot here, but in a way I found really interesting and successful. I had totally forgotten Lupita Nyong'o's character from the first film, though, so some parts of the movie were a bit confusing, and as a friend pointed out, why is this sequel to a groundbreaking Afrofuturist text about two victims of imperialism fighting each other as opposed to, you know, the colonizer? The final battle was, thankfully, surprisingly short for a Marvel movie. But I look forward to seeing where they go with Shuri as Black Panther; I've been a fan of Letitia Wright since Cucumber and Banana. So, not a great film, but certainly doing more interesting things than The Way of Water, and doing them better.
The nice-but-actually-mean thing to say about this movie is that at least it's better than Us, but it's no Get Out. This is about a horse farm that trains horses for films suddenly coming under attack by a strange force. It has some good comedy, and there's a nice sense of group-of-disparate-people-pull-off-a-crazy-plan, and the explanations are reasonably satisfying, but it's one of those cases where I read the Wikipedia article and ended up feeling that the movie the director said he was making was more interesting than the one I watched, if you see what I mean. But, you know, better this than another Marvel movie.
I had never even heard of this before it became a Hugo finalist, but dutifully signed up for Apple TV+ for two months to work my way through it. It's about a corporation where people are "severed": your work self and your home self become different people, each with no memory of the other. For the "outie," it's a great deal: you get paid, but never remember going to work. But for the "innie," it's a slog, because you spend your whole life at work and know nothing better. It's a bit phildickian, in a good way; it captures that feeling I really liked in Ubik or Martian Time-Slip, of "new technologies, same old bullshit," the alienation from the world that is the postmodern condition. There are some great performances (Parks and Rec's Adam Scott, of course, but all four leads are strong), some excellent jokes, and some decent twists. That said, there are probably a bit too many twists; I would have been more interested in exploring some of the psychological and sociological consequences of the "severance" technology, but the series moves into the kind of conspiracy thriller territory that is a bit too standard in streaming shows. I might have ranked it higher except that the first season doesn't really tell a complete story, so it's not totally satisfying, and hard to judge as a whole.
I watched a lot of Pixar films as a child, but few in adulthood; in the past five years thanks to the double-whammy of parenthood and Hugo voting, that has changed. Of the several I have seen in the past few years (which include Inside Out, Onward, and Soul), this is a clear favorite, abandoning the usual Pixar formula (two disparate personalities work together to cross a strange landscape) in favor of a beautiful story of adolescence and the experience of immigration and assimilation. The main character is a Chinese-Canadian who turns into a red panda when embarrassed, and this is a potent fantasy metaphor for her relationship with her mother and with the culture of her classmates. Lots of good jokes, great character beats, and a beautiful climax that gave me goosebumps.
1. Everything Everywhere All at Once, written and directed by DanielsThis squarely hits my interests in storytelling: big sf concept that is interesting on its own merits but also a powerful metaphor for real life, takes itself totally seriously but also not seriously at all at the exact same time, characters who are just regular people living regular lives turning out to be the moral linchpins. I thought this was excellent from top to bottom, hilarious and also touching. I don't think anyone talks about the "New Sincerity" anymore, but surely this is it at its best: all the techniques of postmodernism deployed to a heartwarming message. This year's top three were all excellent, but this was an easy winner.
Best Graphic Story or Comic
7. Dune: The Official Movie Graphic Novel, script by Lilah Sturges, art by Drew JohnsonThe comic of the movie of the novel? Really?? This seems spectacularly pointless. Sure, do a comic of the original novel and unleash the visual imagination of Frank Herbert in a way that can't be captured by another medium. (And I believe there are some comics directly based on the novel.) But why try to capture the visual imagination of a film of a novel on the page? It seems pointless—and once you read it, you realize it is pointless. This vastly accelerated set of highlights with art that essentially copies film stills gives you little sense of the grandeur of either film or novel.
6. No Award
I find the nomination of Dune fundamentally inexplicable. There is no way this is one of the six best sf&f comics of the year.
5. Cyberpunk 2077: Big City Dreams, script by Bartosz Sztybor, art by Alessio Fioriniello and Filipe AndradeThis is a tie-in to the game Cyberpunk 2077, and its nomination is also inexplicable. It's about two people in some kind of cyberpunk dystopia, one of whom wants to climb the criminal ranks, the other of whom just wants to fantasize about living an easy, meaningful life in the country. It's okay, but some of the art is hard to follow and much of what happens is pretty cliché. It has its moments, but there's nothing here to make you care.
4. Monstress: Devourer, script by Marjorie Liu, art by Sana TakedaI've put Monstress—which I believe has never missed the Hugo ballot since 2017—in sixth several times. That I did not do so this year is more a testament to the low quality of the other nominees in this category than anything else. I didn't think it was very great this year, but I'd definitely prefer to see it win over a Dune or Cyberpunk 2077 tie-in.
3. Once & Future: Monarchies in the U.K., script by Kieron Gillen, art by Dan MoraThis
is volume four of Gillen and Mora's sequence about King Arthur returning in modern Britain... only as a zombie. As is so often true of Kieron Gillen comics, I can't help but feel the premise has more potential than is used. There are a lot of clever spins on Arthurian legend here... but they mostly only justify exciting action sequences, rather than say something interesting about Britain. But it is exciting and I like the characters, so it is certainly better than Cyberpunk 2077 or Monstress.
2. Saga, Volume Ten, script by Brian K. Vaughan, art by Fiona StaplesSaga is back! It's been what, three years I think since volume nine? I usually read it in the form of the huge hardcover omnibus volumes, but I am glad to have this little taster of what is to come. It's been a while, so my memory on many story points is murky, but I still enjoyed this a lot. Good character work, decent twists, and as always amazing art from Fiona Staples. Not so sure about the villain who speaks like a Twitter conservative. It isn't quite as good as the self-contained Woman of Tomorrow... though even if it was, I'm don't think the Hugo Awards are really for rewarding tenth volumes in ongoing series! Give the award to something new and interesting. (Saga won for its first volume, and was a finalist for volumes two, three, six, seven, and nine; if I was king of the universe, it wouldn't be a finalist again until its final volume—assuming, of course, that it sticks the landing.) But given the weakness of the other finalists this year, it acquits itself fairly well regardless.
1. Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow, script by Tom King, art by Bilquis EvelyThis was the first of the Best Graphic Story finalists I read, but as soon as I read it, it felt clearly like the one to beat. Beautiful art from Bilquis Evely, but also a really well put together story with a new-but-familiar spin on a classic character. In the end, I was right; nothing in this category came close.
Overall Thoughts
I feel like Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form) is unusually strong this year. Even though I don't care for, say, She-Hulk, I can see that it's interesting and why other people would like it. The top three finalists, in particular, are pretty strong. (Though it really is too bad "The Eye" wasn't a finalist.) I think it's probably going to be "Dear Billy," but if not, I think one of the episodes of Andor.
Dramatic Presentation (Long Form) was also interesting (Avatar aside), but in this case, there's a clear winner: I have little doubt that Everything Everywhere All at Once will not win. It won't be close as, say, Arrival, but it will win.
Best Graphic Story continues to slog along as a category. We have four repeat finalists... but alas, the two new series/creators are the worst ones! Move over, Monstress. I am going to go out on a limb and claim this will be Tom King's year to finally win it... but he came in sixth last year, so what do I know?
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