Kentish Express Ashford & District - What's On
TRUST YOUR CHOICE
I’ m stupid. And so are you. That’s why we use sites like Rotten Tomatoes, even though we know what they say is rubbish.
Rotten Tomatoes is a website which collates a range of film reviews to produce a generalised score for each movie. The RT team take reviews from critics, look at what the writers are saying, and then decide whether the film is “fresh” or “rotten”. There’s a little bit of nuance, in that movies rated above 75% are certified fresh, over 60% is fresh and 59% or under is rotten, but it really doesn’t mean much. Alongside these critic scores are audience scores driven by the public. They usually tell a very different story, but nobody looks at those.
Let’s look at two films from last year. The first is Batman vs Superman, which was completely eviscerated by critics. It currently has a critics score of 27% on Rotten Tomatoes, but a public rating of 63%. So, the general public don’t think it’s brilliant but reckon it was pretty good and not deserving of the opprobrium dumped on it. It goes the other way too. Love and Friendship was also released last year, but unlike Batman vs Superman, it was adored by the vast majority of critics. It was based on a story by Jane Austen and starred Kate Beckinsale. It was an agreeable kind of a film, but by no means special. Nonetheless it has a 98% “certified fresh” rating from critics.
The audience score is markedly lower – 61%. That’s more like it. Above average, but not superb. It’s an imbalance that some think is having a real-life effect on some films’ fortunes. One of these people is director and producer Brett Ratner. He said: “The worst thing that we have in today’s movie culture is Rotten Tomatoes. I think it’s the destruction of our business.”
His fury was sparked by the “rotten” score given to Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, which his company Ratpac Entertainment co-produced. He said: “I have such respect and admiration for film criticism. When I was growing up, it was a real art. And there was intellect that went into that... and that doesn’t exist any more. Now it’s about a number. A compounded number of how many positives v negatives. Now it’s about, “What’s your Rotten Tomatoes score?” And that’s sad, because the Rotten Tomatoes score was so low on Batman v Superman I think it put a cloud over a movie that was incredibly successful.”
He’s mostly right, but Ratner is also overlooking the problems inherent in that film. Batman vs Superman could have (and should have) been one of the all-time great superhero movies. What we got instead was overblown, overcomplicated and underwritten. But like I said, it wasn’t “bad”, and he’s right to challenge the way Rotten Tomatoes reduces everything to a symbol; a fresh tomato or a green splat.
So if we all know that Rotten Tomatoes is imperfect, why do we still use it?
Part of the reason is laziness, but I think fear plays an even bigger role.
It’s a fear of missing out, a fear of making the wrong decision. But it’s a fear that works against us.
We may not actually have less time than ever before, but it definitely feels that way sometimes. And with that short time, we need to cram in all the stuff we want to watch. There’s so much of it. So many TV shows that colleagues are raving about, so many movies that our friends say we simply must see.
How do we choose what to watch? How do we make sure we’re not depriving ourselves of future conversations or being able to click Like on Facebook? We choose the thing that everyone else likes. And this is where it’s in conflict with us – I’ll use myself as an example. I like Adam Sandler films. There, I said it.
They always make me laugh. I know they’re not cool, or intellectual, or even well-acted, but there’s always something in them that tickles me. And yet, I went through a selfimposed Sandler drought for around two years because of the abjectly awful scores his films had on Rotten Tomatoes. Sure, things I’d seen and enjoyed before also had low scores, but these more recent films… what if they were different?
What if I invest two hours in watching Blended (14% on RT), and it’s not very good and I feel a deep sense of loss at throwing away time that could have been invested in something worthy or award-winning or that my peers liked?
And that’s the state of mind I was in for a long while, until I bit the bullet, watched a film with a bad score that I thought I’d probably like anyway and… did like it.
Even if I didn’t though, so what? It’s two hours. If I did go for Ken Loach’s new exercise in visual depression, would my life be any better? Doubtful. The Rotten Tomatoes system doesn’t mean anything. Critics are just people with opinions. If Brett Ratner’s right, and otherwise fairly-good films are losing out because punters just see a number or a picture and decide not to take a chance, then the industry is in trouble. The problem is, the only way to fix it is to convince folk to trust their own judgement, and that’s harder and harder to do.