2009: The Starstore Year End Review

2009 draws to a close with a bang thanks to James Cameron’s epic Avatar movie doing huge business around the world, but there have been a number of milestones this year that have seen the geek community rejoicing (and flaming each other, as ever). It has been a pretty good year for genre entertainment as a whole, and the recession hasn’t slowed down people’s need for entertainment all that much. In fact, in some areas, such as science fiction and fantasy publishing for example, numbers have actually seen an upturn.

The big movie events of note this year, for guys and girls like us anyway, have been movies like Zack Snyder’s Watchmen adaptation, JJ Abram’s Star Trek, UP, Coraline and the aforementioned Avatar. These films have been powerful reminders of just what genre cinema is capable of. There has also been a large number of duds too, with films like the disappointing (yet hugely successful) Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, Dragonball: Evolution, Street Fighter: The Legend of Chun-Li and the bizarre mish-mash that was X-men origins: Wolverine.

The Twilight phenomenon continued to grow, and fever pitch arrived in November when the second movie in the series of adaptations, The Twilight Saga: New Moon, opened to derision from critics and a gush of fan love from the Twilight addicts. Twilight did maintain its stranglehold on the publishing world too, and a huge range of other romantic vampire novels filled the void left by Twilight once fans had read the four books in Meyer’s series.

Harry Potter returned to our screens too, with the sixth film in the series. Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince saw a shift in direction as well as a much darker tone, which has left us curious as to how the two-part adaptation of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows will turn out.

Two genre films in particular must be noted in any review of 2009, namely the awe-inspiring District 9 and the terrifying Paranormal Activity, two films that reminded us that a good story and a powerful execution of it can be much more satisfying than a vapid blockbuster. This is something that the industry needs to take more note of in coming years, especially as movies with lower budgets mean more in the way of profits and more chance of recouping their costs of production. That’s not to say studios should scrimp on genre projects- just be a bit more creative with them.

The Comics scene had some notable titles too, including the Green Lantern tale ‘Blackest Night’ and the continued chaos following Batman’s ‘Death’. Marvel brought us Wolverine: Weapon X, Nomad: Girl Without a World and great runs of Iron Man and the Amazing Spider-Man. TV hits we loved included the Doctor Who special ‘The Waters Of Mars’, certainly the best out of David Tennant’s final year as the Doctor, the spectacular end of Battlestar Galactica and the impeccable Torchwood miniseries ‘Children of Earth’.

It’s been a good year for science fiction and fantasy fans on the whole, and our genres have seen an increase in both popularity and respect amongst the general populace. 2010 will see brand new Doctor Who, iron Man 2, Caprica and more delights than we could possibly list. We’ll be continuing our mission to bring you news and opinion on the very best of them. The future is coming, and it’s looking like fun.

Happy New Year to all of our readers from everyone at Starstoreblog!

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 31st, 2009 at 1:22 pm and is filed under Geek Culture. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.