Is gender politics to blame for Star Wars: The Last Jedi’s low online review scores?

It’s the enduring mystery of Star Wars: The Last Jedi: Do viewers actually hate it or are its terrible online audience ratings — 53 per cent as of Friday on Rotten Tomatoes — the work of hidden forces?

With very few exceptions, critics liked The Last Jedi. More than nine in 10 critics approved of the film by Rotten Tomatoes’ count.

But so much for professional opinions. Metacritic’s humble users gave the film a failing 4.8 out of 10.

Deepening the mystery, the Washington Post’s Michael Cavna wrote, real-life viewers polled at movie theatres overwhelmingly liked the film. And its ticket sales have been outstanding. So some suspect that something strange is afoot with the online scores.

Web voting systems are notoriously easy to manipulate, whether through mass trolling; with computer script; or simply by repeatedly logging onto a site with different usernames.

The owner of an obscure anti-Disney forum claimed credit for the purported sabotage of Last Jedi.

The anonymous moderator of the “Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys” Facebook page, which has barely 300 subscribers, claimed to have created a network of Facebook bots that were able to drive the movie’s score down with bad reviews. The moderator offered no proof for this and his stated motives were, at first, too obscure to make national news.

He was attacking the movie’s scores, he wrote, to get back at Disney for changes to the Star Wars canon. But in subsequent posts, the man added gender politics to his list of Star Wars grievances.

“Male leads who aren’t (gay) or colored (sic) or both WILL ALWAYS be better than female leads,” he wrote. “They should just stay in the kitchen instead of playing with Lightsabers,” he added.

The Last Jedi features the strongest lineup of female leaders in the franchise’s history. That has earned some enemies, especially in far-right-wing forums that still revere the old stereotype of the white, male hero.