The Alternative Hugo shortlist for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form

Sunshine (Boyle/Garland) - (reviewed by me here) A relatively low-budget British SF film from the creative team behind 28 Days Later....  Much like that Zombie film and its sequel, Sunshine is a revisitation of a genre that it effectively dead in cinematic terms - that of the traditional SF yarn.  Beautifully shot, it tells the tale of a group of humans who are sent to deliver a bomb to the heart of the Sun in order to restart it and thereby save the Earth.  At the time, the film was bizarrely slated even by genre film critics for its lack of scientific verisimilitude but in truth, the film is a powerful piece about the inconsequential nature of human existence in the face of a fast and terrifyingly indifferent universe.  Faced with this realisation, some turn to religion or embrace suicide while others accept not only the meaninglessness of life but also its terrible beauty.



Beowulf (Zemeckis/Gaiman and Avary) - (reviewed by me here) Though clearly not as thoughful as Gunnarson's 2005 adaptation Beowulf & Grendel, Zemechis' Beowulf was visually stunning and solved the poem's problem of repetition by musing on the relationship between the moral absolutism of the heroic lifestyle and the more expedient world-view required to be a skilled politican and leader.  Ultimately damned by the need to lure in large audiences with a simplistic moral conclusion, the film nonetheless boasted some strong performances and one of the best scripts to grace a fantasy film in recent memory.




The Host (Joon-ho/Chul-hyun and Joon-ho) - (reviewed by me here) A beautifully made, if unevenly paced, Korean monster movie that combined the political subtext of Godzilla with the character-centric focus of Q: The Winged Serpent.  Far from being an action packed roller coaster, the film was an examination of how dramatic events can serve as catalysts for psychological change.  While many of these psychological arcs feel sketchy upon first viewing, the film's true beauty becomes apparent once you realise that, as with his first film Memories of Murder, Joon-ho has painted a broad canvas of a tightly-knit group in psychological turmoil.  The violence and the spontaneity of the scenes with the monster beautifully highlight an incredibly precise and subtle job of characterisation.




30 Days of Night (Slade/Niles, Beattie and Nelson) - Another visually arresting work of horror based upon a graphic novel by Steve Niles and Ben Templesmith.  Set in Barrow, Alaska, the film is about the double-edged sword that is turning your back upon society.  As the northernmost town in America, Barrow experiences 30 days of total darkness prompting a group of vampires to isolate the town and hunt and kill the entire population.  With a palette of blood reds, silvery snows and pitch black nights, the film is deeply atmospheric and utterly merciless in its depiction of vampires as these hideous inhuman things that lurk outside of civilisation.  So inhuman in their manners and language, these Vampires seem be demons of isolation and madness made flesh.  Fittingly, the only way the town's sherif can defeat them is by surrendering the the savagery and becoming one.  But then, when the sun finally rises, he must be dismissed.  Civilisation has no place for such creature.



[Rec] (Balaguero and Plaza/Balaguero, Pedejo and Plaza) - [Rec] hides its light under the bushel of a formulaic horror film.  Ostensibly a story of zombies in a Spanish apartment complex, [Rec] is a film about the dangers of undiscovered spaces (making it an interesting counterpoint to the more community-minded 30 Days of Night).  The film begins with a camera crew filming a night on patrol with firemen but before long they find themselves trapped in a bizarre building.  Soon the secrets of the building as well of the secrets of the people trapped within it are laid bare and the exploration of those strange spaces is immediately and brutally punished by the rising tide of zombie infection.  Genuinely creepy and containing more ideas than the last three Romero films, [Rec] is a brutal and twisted work of genre film-making.



EDIT : It occurs to me that I should probably pick a favourite.  Easy.  Sunshine was the finest genre film of 2007.

Comments

[DBE]

No argument there. SUNSHINE was definitely the cream of the crop. I'm astounded that it didn't get nominated.

[Jonathan M]

Weirdly enough, a lot of genre reviewers seemed to hate it and reviewed it under the assumption that it was some kind of work of Hard SF rather than the more "humanistic" piece it actually was.

As I said, I think there's something very wrong with a voting community that thinks that Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a better film than Sunshine.

[Shaun CG]

I've not seen three of the entries, but I'll put my vote forward for The Host. Best horror film I've seen in some time, easily.

[Jonathan M]

Hey Shaun :-)

Yeah, apparently he's in the process of making a sequel to it. I am profoundly ambivalent about this fact.

[ShaunCG]

Mmm. Sequels. Well...

[Martin]

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix is a far better film than Sunshine. At least it manages to stay consistent.

[Jonathan M]

Consistently mediocre.

Sunshine's a fantastic film if you look at it less like a thriller and more like an art house work. The plot details don't fully work but they nicely support the film's subtext and the visuals are incredible. Never has Stapledon's line about "Great are the stars and man is of no account to them" been better translated onto the cinema screen.

[dr rick]

Sunshine was almost a great movie, until the mystifying and incredibly disappointing descent into a mediocre slasher movie near the end. That broke it for a lot of viewers, including me.

I thought that 30 Days Of Night was the best genre movie of the year.

[Jonathan M]

Hi Rick :-)

I thought it had its place. The film was partly about the psychological reaction to the howling nothingness of space. I thought that thematically the idea of a singed madman who is waiting for God was pretty much spot on.

Criticising Sunshine for having slasher elements is a bit like saying that Bergman's films are terrible as nothing happens. Fair enough, but you're missing the point if you concentrate solely on plot.

[kev mcveigh]

The Best SF film I've seen in years was I'm Not There -- Todd Haynes alt-history multi-reality telling of Bob Dylan's life.

[Jonathan M]

Hey Kev,

Good call. The use of different actors was quite Dickean. There were loads of great genre and genre-related films out in 2007 that were nowhere near the shortlist or even the long list.