Hugo 2014: Best Dramatic Presentation Long Form
This is a tough vote. The best movie among the nominees is clearly Gravity (though you could make a case for Frozen) but my concern is that it’s not speculative. This is set in the present day, with present day technology. If it had been done 40 years ago it would have been SF. Today it isn’t. IMHO, merely being set in space does not qualify a movie as SF, so as good as it is, it doesn’t get my vote.
So first place goes to Frozen, though I’m not as swept away by it as many people were.
Second place goes to Pacific Rim, which is a surprisingly good Godzilla-style monster movie. It’s not great art but it’s fun.
Third place goes to the The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. I loved the book, but the movie just didn’t capture it well enough (unlike the first movie in the series).
Fourth place goes to Iron Man 3. It wasn’t great but it wasn’t awful.
There’s one surprising omission in the nominees though. What happened to Her? This was easily the best science fiction movie of 2013. That it didn’t get nominated is a travesty.
