* If tomatometer & audience score are within 5% of each other, you can trust the ratings to give you a decent indiciation of movie quality.
* If tomatometer is more than 15%+ higher than audience score, it means it's an artsy fartsy movie that critics like and movies don't.
* If audience score is 15%+ higher than tomatometer, it's a fun movie even if it's not oscar worthy. (https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/old_school is a perfect example)
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The Last Jedi
Tomatometer 91% Audience 41%: Artsy Fartsy
[Really?]
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The Greatest Showman
Tomatometer 56% Audience 86%: Fun, not oscar worthy
[Won Oscar for Best Original Song]
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EDIT: Truthfully, it was the release of these two films (both Dec 2017) that caused the Tomatormeter and I to part ways. Simply indefensible, IMO.
80% fresh means that 80% of reviews are "positive" it's not 8/10 how some people like to think.
Oscar worthy - best picture, best actor, etc. Best original song isn't a top tier category. That year also had weak competition.
The Greatest Showman was nominated in a single category, and it lost to Coco. I don't know where you got that it won. Coco got nominated in two categories, one of which was important, and won both. Coco also within 3% difference on rotten tomatoes.
It also hard (impossible) to do bait and switch like sellers do on amazon.
I still use the ratings (because they're built into Plex) but mostly as a novelty, and sometimes as a puzzlement. Increasingly, you see scores like 5% tomato, 95% audience (or vice versa!) that I'm sure mean _something_ but rarely anything to me.
But it sucks from the point of view of watching something enjoyable, and especially so if you were looking for a straight follow-up of TFA.
[0] Think space-walrus cliffs, or red-salt Hoth, or lightspeed kamikazee, or the Snoke throne room battle
TLJ: cultural elites liked the whole burning the sacred texts thing, normies hated it. (NB: I only vaguely remember this movie and don't have strong opinions about it, don't crucify me.)
The Greatest Showman: I assume "not oscar worthy" meant specifically not "Best Picture" worthy. It's a specific type of movie that wins that award.
In any case, just like you append " reddit" to most searches, I recommend appending " letterboxd" to any movie searches. You do kind of have to read the reviews instead of just going by the rating though.
Wouldn't the "cultural elites" in this context be the hardcore Star Wars fans who hated everything about the new trilogy, and Luke's disillusionment arc in particular, and the "normies" be the mainstream fans who really didn't care?
* Overly artsy
* Overly political. Reviewers feel the need to give it a positive review because they agree with the message, while the audience will split because they're not as homogenous politically.
* Outraged fans. Reviewers aren't typically fans of a given franchise and so won't notice if it ruins something that would irritate a fan. The Last Jedi is in this category.
* Bribery.
1. Luke went from the most optimistic and positive Jedi in the world, who found the good in Darth Vader, to a dude who tried to kill his own nephew without any explanation on how he got to that point aside from "I had a bad dream". Pathetic even if you ignore he also had dreams about becoming Darth Vader himself, and overcame those.
2. They completely destroyed any sense of time or speed with their "this turtle is so slow but too fast" race as the main plot point
3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end. Instead, they killed the only good character that was set up perfectly to be the new cutthroat cunning but likable leader of the rebellion.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
And this is just what I can remember on my phone while sitting at this bar. If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
Critics 56%
Audience 84%
That movie wasn't fun. It was the first part in the series where hoped the bad guy wins.
In the previous films the nonsense physics was at least entertaining.
The show that always sticks in my mind as an example is HBO’s Watchmen, which has 96% with critics and 56% with the audience.
And example would be Dave Chapelles specials.
Exceptionally good movies (which Paddington 2 is btw) will trend heavily toward 100% and any drop from 100% are from outlier reviewers. Citizen Kane has 1/131 negative reviews and Paddington 2 has 2/253 negative reviews.
If you want a rating of quality you can always just click on the score and see that paddington 2 has an 8.7 aggregate compared to Citizen Kane's 9.9.
* what percent of viewers will not regret watching the movie. That makes this a combination metric of quality and variance. A low variance 7/10 will beat a high variance 8/10 in RT score
So highest-grossing doesn't mean absolutely anything about how good a movie is, or whether people actually liked it. There is a huge contingent of people that follow religiously a franchise and will pay to watch the new one even if they've been told it is not very good. You don't skip the latest Star Wars movie if you call yourself a Star Wars fan, and it is marketing's job to create the Star Wars fan in the first place.
As a cynic, I'd argue the opposite to what you said: you have to spend more on marketing if the material is not very good in the first place. The result is a terrible movie that becomes a meme and still makes bank.
While I agree with your criticisms of The Last Jedi, I don't think you can under any circumstances consider this movie "artsy fartsy".
The Last Jedi is the anti-artsy fartsy movie, otherwise the term loses all meaning. It doesn't mean "bad", and an artsy-fartsy movie can be good. Focusing on just the technical or glossy aspects doesn't make a movie artsy, it just makes it bad.
I didn't think she was fully unconscious. Also, "magically"? She used the Force. It's an energy field created by all living things. It surrounds us and penetrates us. It binds the galaxy together. In this case, given she was in a vacuum, just a slight pull on the ship is all she needed to fly back to it.
> Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training
Well, that is the premise, though. Luke himself grew immensely powerful with much less training than Anakin. Some people are just born with stronger Force. Something something midichlorians
For what it's worth, I agree with him. When I saw the movie and even just the promotional materials I thought it was visually striking and had very strong color themes. But wow, it was a train wreck in terms of plot, characters, faithfulness to the series, etc. I could go on for hours.
But to be fair, I also think The Force Awakens was terrible and painted the story into a dumb direction. Instead of “what if the Nazis came back to power in Argentina”, they should have moved the story into a direction more like “the alliance against a common enemy is fractured”, like what actually happened after World War 2, or “there are now many factions of ambitious warlords rising among the widely deployed and still incredibly powerful imperial military”, or some of both. The Mandalorian did the setting much better in that sense.
The Watchmen TV show is a horrible example as it's literally fan-fiction with little to no real connection to the graphic novel. So that fact alone pissed a lot of people off.
It completely ignored the only actual "squeal" (Doomsday Clock) to create the story they wanted to tell while borrow the popularity of the name to get attention.
Even ignoring all that did you actually even watch it? 96% is complete bullshit. 96% means some of the best TV ever made. I don't think it's a 56% but the 56% is way closer to reality then the 96%.
Doesn't happen as much anymore since they require proof of ticket purchase to review, but it still will on occasion. And it happened enough previously that they specifically had to put the proof of purchase condition in place.
They tend to hate Star Wars because it's wildly successful and popular, but it doesn't have any of the cultural crap that they want.
Cultural Elites are the ones who decide what wins Oscars, for example.
The nice thing about letterboxd is that many different subgroups are represented, so you can find the reviews you vibe with and get a better idea of whether the movie will appeal to subgroup you're a part of.
There's probably a pretty decent youtube essay on like the balkanization of culture and also the construction of identity through consumption, and how social media has turbo-charged all this here.
Attendance is expectations, and rating is reality, after the necessary act of paying to watch the film. A film that someone is excited to see can still stink.
It did make 30% less than TFA.
Eg Captain Marvel or She Hulk being generally disliked compared to Iron Man, Hulk or Captain America, The Last Jedi being disliked in the Star Wars community or in gaming, The Last of Us Part 2 being much more controversial than the original.
Put aside the politics for a bit and actually pay attention to the arguments and it becomes clear that people aren't specifically complaining that Captain Marvel is a woman, but that she isn't interesting or likable. Similarly TLOU2 wasn't controversial primarily because of the trans character, but because it essentially wrecked what people liked so much about the original for seemingly no meaningful reason. When faced with that, it's unsurprising that the conclusion tends to be that the series was sacrificed at the altar of politics.
This is such a common tactic in gaming when a game is controversial, just lean on the claim that gamers are typically bigots and get away with anything because most people don't want to be called bigots. It's why Steam Reviews are preferable to reviews from journalists on whether or not a game is worth playing.
You seem not to understand the Rotten Tomatoes score though. 96% just means that 96% of critics gave it a positive review. That says nothing about how positive the review was.
Idk how many of them would describe it as one of the best shows ever, though that’d be an interesting score as well.
We ritually act online as if trying to create workarounds for obviously corruptible services will make things better, but it simply doesn't. It only serves to keep rewarding companies that have sold us out, including the process of normalizing the sale and security compromise of our user data. Supporting bad apps and companies after breaches of trust only works to reward them and undermine reliability overall for ethical services and companies. Workarounds also enable companies to breach trust more and more over time as well... Class action lawsuits are also no consolation, as they only cost a fraction of the illicit gains a company makes on being willfully corrupt, and they mostly reward law firms, not victims.
I hope we change this workaround narrative, and start holding bad business accountable for it's schemes instead of embracing it as normalized behavior. LET THEM FAIL. :/
I opt for the audience in this case.
Lost Highway (1997) - 68% Tomatometer - 87% Audience Score
Fight Club (1999) - 79% Tomatometer - 96% Audience Score
American Psycho (2000) - 68% Tomatometer - 85% Audience Score
Requiem for a Dream (2000) - 78% Tomatometer - 93% Audience Score
Dancer in the Dark (2000) - 69% Tomatometer - 91% Audience Score
Oldboy (2003) - 82% Tomatometer - 94% Audience Score
The Prestige (2006) - 77% Tomatometer - 92% Audience Score
Joker (2019) - 69% Tomatometer - 88% Audience Score
Luke was always fragile. He barely trained with Yoda, then he basically failed up to celebrity status. His weakness has always been his impatience, and his preference for the quick and easy out.
He became an icon, he got old and disillusioned, he realized his naive view of the world and the Force didn't apply to reality, as he saw the Jedi being just as corrupt as the Sith, and just as the Jedi did he fell back into a rigid orthodoxy that led him to repeat the cycle of generational darkness that he never took the proper effort to address because he was never properly trained. And in the end, he regained a truer and more grounded faith in the force than he had before. What Yoda literally said would happen, happened.
That isn't pathetic, it's an actual character arc. Unfortunately, people like yourself only wanted Luke Skywalker to remain a cardboard cutout.
>3. Leia went into outer space unconscious but magically flew back in without dying???
Leia is the sister of one of the most powerful Jedi in history. She has the Force, too.
It's weird how many people completely missed that.
5. They ruined every other fight in star wars with the hyperspace joust. Why was any other fight a big deal when they could have just rammed a few ships with jump drives into the star destroyers, or hell, the death star.
I've never understood this argument. Why don't we simply kamikaze aircraft and submarines into our enemies now? Why bother with guns and missiles?
I mean, it's a risky (potentially deadly) maneuver that a rebellion lacking in personnel and equipment can scarcely afford to lose through normalizing. It's not something you do all the time even when it is effective. Japan only resorted to kamikaze missions out of desperation.
And I'm curious what exactly you think the effect of ramming into one ship with another ship transitioning into hyperspace should be, and why it shouldn't be an effective weapon at all?
No, this is just finding shit to nitpick about.
>6. Rey is somehow the strongest force user now despite no training. Every other Jedi that got to be that strong had a lifetime of training and tribulations, but now Rey can just beat kylo ren, a lifelong trained Jedi Skywalker with the power of the dark side, just because she's a Mary Sue.
It was established that the Force is a constant, distributed amongst all Jedi. The fewer Jedi there are, the more powerful each becomes because they have access to a greater portion of the whole. Rey was as powerful as she was because, as one of the few Force users left, she had potential access to nearly all of it.
>If you think this movie wasn't a deep betrayal to the universe, you didn't pay any attention to it.
I don't know, it seems like you're the one who didn't pay attention. Did you even see any of the new trilogy or just jump on the hate train when it was popular? Because I've seen all of your criticisms, verbatim, repeated ad nauseum, by people who just seem to be repeating memes.
If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things. Just look at how The Wire explores different aspects of Baltimore’s crime epidemic in each season as an example.
And I’m not saying Captain Marvel is great or even good by the way. I thought it was just another boring superhero move, and a D or F tier at that. Same goes for a lot of your other examples.
But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching.
Just look at Mission Impossible for example. Each film is well made and has fun action. But do we really ever need another one? Doesn’t essentially the same thing happen every time? Isn’t Ethan Hunt always going to save the day and risk everything for his friends and the mission?
What?? When was that established?
>4. They kept the elderly Leia around, instead of having her do a hero's sendoff at the end.
I don't want to get into a long drown out fight about Star Wars on HN so I'll ignore most of your points, but this complaint has always really bothered me because it shows such a huge lack of human empathy. A real person died, a person that was one of the 4 or 5 most important people to the success of Star Wars. And it has become the standard opinion of her "fans" that her last performance should have been largely thrown away to slightly improve the overall narrative arc of the movies. It really puts into perspective what fans care about. It is all about the product on the screen. Anyone involved in making the product is meaningless. Their only significance is in their role of servicing the product.
I'm glad they didn't re-edit the movie after Carrie Fisher's death even if it created new challenges for the next movie.
(explaining why Leia _Skywalker_ could do it, but not any ordinary Joe)
...he ended up with a movie that was visually very striking without any plot fundamentals, that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.
Behold the terrible power of a misplaced comma, and the warped reality it inflicts upon the careless reader.
Look on the bright side, it could have been 2 Death Stars and a whole bunch of bad space boobs jokes.
I would much rather watch a movie that has a 50% on RT and a 70 on Metacritic than a movie that has 100% on RT and a 70 on Metacritic. I might not like that 50% movie, but those ratings show some people really love it. The 100% movie's ratings show that everyone kinda likes it, but few people feel strongly about it meaning it is probably not a very interesting watch.
You might disagree, but that’s just an example of what makes the show so good. It’s shocking and subtle and up for interpretation. It makes you think, regardless of whether you agree.
Don't forget about the pointless plot of the animal racing with John Boyega's character that went no where.
Also, don't forget the whole dressing down of Poe Dameron by Leia and Vice-Admiral Holdo as lol guy dumb. But the action gets ignored because she decides lol ship danger ram into bad guy.
I found that I hated the movie more and more as I explained the plot to a friend. I went from this is a solid dud to I really hated this when I went and described the action in the film.
Nobody said that. You're building a straw man and putting words into people's mouths (or comments, rather).
Of course there's always going to be changes when adapting for different media. People dislike when important things change.
> If you don’t change anything, then what’s the point of watching/reading/playing the same thing over and over? Doesn’t any series just get incredibly boring without variation?
I've re-read lots of books, and there's many reasons I do it. Sometimes it's as stupid as missing the characters. Sometimes I'm co-reading with a friend who just recently started the series and I recommended it; so it's like a little book club. Sometimes it's nostalgia, etc.
Similarly regarding TV shows. Sometimes I just wanna share the moment with another person, see their reaction etc.
Games are a whole different situation though. Not sure why you even put that in there. Do you play games often? I feel like you either don't, or just play a genre of games I don't. It kinda baffles me why you'd even ask what the point of replaying games is...
> Great literature, TV, and films say things. Sometimes you might not agree. But at least it makes you think. Ideally, each entry in a series should say different or evolving things.
I both agree and disagree... I like the way something like BSG or Arcane (TV show, great btw) or even Buffy "says things" where they're not, ... literally spelled out in a patronising way?
> But I do think even beloved series have to have room for adaptation and experimentation. Because otherwise, they stagnate and can get to a point where they’re no longer worth watching
I kinda agree with this, though. There's some great successful examples of this (JoJo's Bizarre Adventures or Supernatural come to mind)
It has to be nothing, or else none of the other movies make sense at all. Kinetic energy attacks (accelerate a mass to a great velocity) are the most obvious attack there is, from the dawn of time with throwing rocks to bows and arrows to muskets to cannons on up. And in a universe where you can accelerate a mass immediately to light speed, nothing else will really compare.
So yes, at some level it makes obvious sense that a kamikaze of one starship to another "should" work. But in the Star Wars universe we had had to suspend that disbelief (in some ways justified because light speed jumping isn't real, so maybe it just doesn't work that way) because otherwise X-wings could take out Star Destroyers and the Death Star is unnecessary because you can just strap the hyperspace drives to large hunk of rock.
> Many times the "rightwing media" driven review bombing is about beloved series being damaged/unfaithful.
> The Watchmen TV show is a horrible example as it's literally fan-fiction with little to no real connection to the graphic novel. So that fact alone pissed a lot of people off.
Both are implying that new entries in a series should stick closely to previous entries. I don’t think being “unfaithful” or changing certain details is wrong if it’s necessary to tell a different story or provide a new experience.
And for games, are you really going to defend how developers make essentially the same Call of Duty and Halo over and over again and sell it for $60?
I never said that games have no replay value, and now you are the one attacking a straw man. I’m criticizing when new entries in a series bring nothing new to the table.
I can see how my wording there could lead to misunderstanding, but still, I thought it was clear based on context what I meant.
Black Panther, for example, was a perfectly fine film... but who isn't bored of Marvel stuff now, and is it really worth 96%? Higher than The Dark Knight? And even that was probably somewhat overrated due to Health Ledger's passing...
In Star Wars, there are "force sensitive" Jedis and not sensitive. I believe Rey was force sensitive just like the Skywalkers. Rey comes from a bloodline of Palpatine too. Thus, this explains how other Jedis' are "quick" to learn, etc.
15% tomatometer, 85% audience score.
Sure it's a dumb stoner comedy, but it's an _amazing_ one. Being "dumb" is half the fun, but of course that translates into "more gross than comedic" and "lazy and unrewarding"
7. why bomb the base they're escaping from and not the ship they're flying to? 8. they only launch about 5 tie fighters against poe at the beginning and the ship only has about 6 self defence lasers. Rogue One showed us just how many Tie fighters could be launched to defend an important base. 9. the rebel bombers. nuf said.
there's so much wrong with that film.
Isn't Luke the same story? He went from zero to Darth Vader rival in a couple of years maybe? Yoda thought that kid Anakin was already too old for training, but Luke was a young adult.
Rey's rise was sillier still, but both heroes are the story of an "even more special individual" superseding the efforts of prior generations by virtue of their intrinsic personal connection with the force - pure genetic destiny.
Otherwise, yes, I generally agree that sales are not necessarily an indication of quality.
The Empire was just that arrogant and self-confident that they never noticed such an obvious flaw until it was too late? Still bullshit.
Sabotage? Better, and it got us Rogue One, which was a great movie. But even then it stretches credibility.
The walkers in Empire Strikes Back are ridiculous, no one would actually build those, with their obvious (and easily exploited) weakness. And in a universe with blasters, no one would ever be using lightsabers. Hell, if you can force choke someone, which even Luke did with that Gammorean guard, why not just force pinch an artery in your enemy's brain or heart? Why bother with all the spinny flips and shit? Just force heart attack from a concealed location, done.
Realistically, you wouldn't even have dogfights in space at all, much less with plane-shaped ships that bank through turns, you would have fully automated, spherical droids attacking from hundreds of thousands of kilometers away or just, as you mentioned, toss a big FU asteroid through hyperspace into the orbit of a planet. And yes, the elephant in the room is that any FTL drive is by definition a weapon of mass destruction.
None of it makes much sense. It never has, because it has always been more important that things look cool than make sense. But the point is, ramming a ship with another ship while going into hyperspace makes no less sense than anything else. The transition to hyperspace isn't instantaneous, you can see the ships zooming in and out of hyperspace and see the starfield warp. So logically there must be a point at which it works. Maybe the margin of error for that is so razor thin that it's not worth trying most of the time. Maybe the particular shape of the ships involved made it an optimal strategy that one time. I don't know, but one can come up with excuses a lot less goofy and contrived that the "maze of black holes" that justifies the parsec line about the Millennium Falcon to justify it.
People are just being particularly nitpicky about this one element while they're willing to forgive the decades of patent ridiculousness that came before.
> without any plot fundamentals that felt like a deep betrayal to the universe.
There should be a comma between “fundamentals” and “that”
It's not dehumanising a person to critique the art she last appeared in.
* Tomatometer ≫ Audience, there is artificial bias on the critics side, perhaps due to political reasons, or perhaps due social conforming by film critics within a clique, or reviews are being paid for by the film industry.
* Tomatometer ≪ Audience, probably more fun, or less serious film, or may have politically confronting themes that critics don't like to praise.
* Tomatometer ≈ Audience, rating is probably a good indicator of film quality.
"Say, man, what's up?"
"Someone just made me think about the myriad ways in which The Last Jedi not just sucked, but sucked the rest of the life from the 40-year history of Star Wars"
"oooof! Here, I'll shout you a bottle of Jack's, but I know it's not enough by far".
Even then, assuming I'm full of shit... she's a Palpatine. Secret legendary bloodline. I hate it but it still works in universe.
TGS: It didn't win an oscar for best song, it was nominated. Regardless of that, best song is not usually considered a top category in the Oscar's from a film critic POV. That would be best movie, director, script, actor/actress.
Probably more in line with the idea that film critics have an inherent type of political inclination being a small, creative niche.
A lot of the old movies you picked are famous and popular in movie pop culture. Audience scoring this in RT probably went out of their way to watch these films, they are not as organic as recent scores as you have a larger number audience scores created by movie lovers.
If you find examples post 2015 when RT became a mainstream scoring system that would be great.
Only movie that's current in your list is "The Joker" which among critics is considered to be a copycat of other critically acclaimed films (taxi driver, the comedian). This is a film that tried hard to look artsy fartsy but was not.
I believe IMBD can help you identify the "most popular" movie. But it's up to you to decide if that's a good indicator for quality.
To give you an example, look at the top 10 songs in Spotify worldwide and tell me if those songs are the "best" songs the art form can provide.
After going deep on an art form, being music, painting, sculpting or film making, you start to develop a taste and an appetite for more complex expressions.
What would you prefer, votes of 10 people that have watched over 1000 films or votes of 1000 people that have watched 10 films?
Rian's intention was to demonstrate some semblance of humanity remained within Kylo. But the optics are that he is truly weak and in the end isn't even bothered much by the (for all he knows at the moment) imminent death of his mother. Had Kylo fired the shot he at least would have surpassed Vader in evilness, whether or not Leia saved herself.
I agree with the "fans" that she should have died in that scene, but since Rian was too scared to snuff Leia before Luke the scene shouldn't have been written in the first place.
With these types of shows, the TV writing will almost certainly be orders of magnitude worse since the originals were written by great authors with great imaginations. So, the more the TV writers try to innovate, the more glaring it's likely to be to fans of the originals. Plus, the innovation typically involves TV writers just ham-fistedly hacking in the drama de jour. I just can't treat the TV versions as independent from the source material when I try to watch them.
If you care less about it, then you'll surely want to try new things, and if it doesn't work out, no big deal.
So far as betrayal goes, from the perspective of someone with that background, TLJ and Rogue One are the only two Disney Star Wars films I’d save from a fire, and I’d give it a hard think before I bothered with Rogue One. Nothing about TLJ struck me as “a deep betrayal”, and on the contrary, it felt like a return to the franchise’s roots in a lot of ways, but with enough of a twist that it wasn’t just a mediocre lazily-plotted remake (cough).
I like your test, but I recently watched "Platonic" series and loved it. But Tomat says 93%, Plebs only concede 74% -- I declare it is not Art house.
I think the critics are wrong about Joker. The fact that it's an homage to Taxi Driver and King of Comedy is completely intentional, to the point of casting Robert De Niro as the talk show host. I don't consider that a detraction from the film at all. Many critics also interpreted it as some kind of political document, which is totally off the mark. One of the big problems with criticism in the 21st century is that people have lost the ability to tell the difference between portraying something and endorsing it.
One of the worse end fights of a marvel film, too, which is saying something, and really matters since that’s like 30 damn minutes of the film.
Lots of good elements and performances. Middling MCU film overall.
I'm not sure what changed with the fewer Force users thing in the new series shrug.
Marketing can boost ticket sales, but there are plenty of examples of movies which flopped despite heavy marketing, just because the audiences didn't like the movie that much.
The ratings on RT and IMDB does not represent the average audience member.
The third movie was still one of the most successful movies of all time.
I don't have some nostalgia emotions of going to cinemas in 80s, waiting in endless lines for tickets, watching it 30x in a row... its a nice scifi soap opera but not much more by today's standards. But its true I don't care about things like canon and entire SW universe, and neither do folks around me.
I was astounded by just how bad it was -> rating.
I did see the next one (the last of the Skywalker series), mostly out of morbid curiosity. That one was just...random. After that I stopped. The halo of the franchise only carries so far.
Or woke. Critics love woke, at least officially. Audiences not so much. I suspect critics also do not actually like those movies in private.
So IMO we should cut the person some slack :). I don’t agree that it’s that way because ultimately that’s a movie by Disney not a movie by Rian Johnson, but it’s weird to say that technical aspects are somehow not related to art
TLJ got great critic reviews and poor audience reviews because it was propaganda designed to please movie executives and their friends who don't care about Star Wars but do care about social engineering (the badly named "cultural elites"). It wasn't intended to please the people who paid to go watch it.
I mean if I start taking apart every single aspect, logical issues are there. Why use useless troopers who can't hit barn when robots are so much better? Space bombers that drop bombs in WWII style doesn't make any sense at all. Empire of first 3 movies is bunch of incompetent idiots who couldn't run a local 7/11, not a galactic empire. Literally pick any aspect, it doesn't make much sense in real world.
I had blast watching new trilogy in cinema, simply because I expected same level of brainless fun as original movies, and it delivered. And that's enough, making SW into some infallible religion is as stupid as other religions.
Not everyone cares and that's fine, but for the people that do care about how the pieces all fit together, TLJ was a travesty.
The thing is, the last trilogy was tremendously enjoyable by general audience, and this is what generates sales after initial weekend. Few butthurt starwars nerds writing endlessly on internet (just like here with consistently flawed arguments) or review bombing out of pure hate don't change anything, luckily.
I had great fun, considered it as brainless popcorn fun just as original trilogy and prequels, exactly just like everybody else I know. Sometimes, that's enough.
The TV show "King the Land" is a Korean drama that aired on cable in Korea this summer and was released at the same time on Netflix worldwide. It was very popular in Korea [1] and many Asian countries. But if you look at IMDB [2] it has a 4.2 rating, with 116 thousand votes of 1/10. Similar Korean shows typically have ratings in the 7-9 range. The reason for the low rating is a controversy over a minor character in the show. I don't know how this mass voting was organized, but it seems to have worked in affecting the IMDB score (and similarly on RT).
Telling a different story that's consistent with the established lore is fine. Dedicated fans get annoyed when established lore breaks; especially when it's something important.
And about writing original stories: I'm all for it! That's not what's happening though, is it? They use the original work as a platform to tell their lame/modified stories or spread some political message (bait&switch the audience basically).
A more honest thing to do would be to put into credits something like "Original stories (loosely) based on {series title}". Then at least people would go in with the correct expectations, and maybe even be pleasantly surprised by the semi-original story.
> are you really going to defend how developers make essentially the same Call of Duty and Halo over and over again and sell it for $60?
Isn't this happening with TV shows and films recently, though? They're all the same cookie cutter TV shows with nearly identical ensemble of characters and the plots look like someone just filled out the same rigid story template.
> I never said that games have no replay value, and now you are the one attacking a straw man. I’m criticizing when new entries in a series bring nothing new to the table. > > I can see how my wording there could lead to misunderstanding, but still, I thought it was clear based on context what I meant.
Right. Sorry then; it wasn't clear to me what you meant. We agree, then, I think. But the point you tried to make is even muddier now. I know you're not saying JK Rowling wrote seven Philosopher Stones, but I'm not sure what you mean. I sure everyone understands it's normal for stories to evolve over the course of a series?
See -
Sound of Freedom (2023) - 60% Tomoatometer - 99% Audience Score
There were daily articles on news sites like Breitbart about how it was the best movie of the year and how biased critics were trying to destroy it. About how readers should watch it to help support a conservative alternative to Hollywood.
It's of course a continuum -- few movies exist squarely in either the "artsy" or "entertaining" ends of the spectrum -- but it's a safe bet Star Wars is closer to the entertaining/spectacle end.
The problem with calling a Star Wars movie "arty fartsy" is that it twists the meaning of this term to mean "a movie I don't like", which I'd rather people did not do.
I just pointed out Watchmen as a rare example where the producers took a big risk by making it about racism and violent extremism. Even though it was a superhero show, it felt fresh due to the new take and ideas.
It rankled a lot of feathers in the process, likely reinforcing Hollywood’s desire to continue making cookie cutter shows instead.
And about Harry Potter - it did a great job of evolving throughout the series to stay fresh. The kids grew up, learned new types of magic, and had constantly changing relationships for one thing.
Also, the series constantly introduced new and interesting characters or killed off extremely popular characters as well.
There was even an installment that heavily made use of time travel, which I thought was depicted in a really cool and satisfying way.
The show had realistic bad guys who did things that the audience is meant to have a strongly negative reaction towards.
I’d take that over cookie cutter cartoon villains any day.
And the idea that TV writers aren’t capable of good writing is total BS by the way. Check out shows like The Wire, Sopranos, Chernobyl, Succession, or Severance.
The Rings of Power is a recent example where almost every strong and noble character is either black or a woman or both. It serves no purpose in the story.
Watchmen was a rare example where they actually took on racial issues rather than just pay lip service to them.
I didn’t find I needed to with TLJ, and complaints of that sort about it don’t resonate with me at all.
It’d have been better if they leaned harder into ripping off other heist movies (ripping things off and slapping a Star Wars coat of paint on them is when Star Wars is at its best—weirdly few people who get to make Star Wars media understand that, but the people behind The Mandalorian clearly did)
We didn’t build quite enough rapport with our characters to make their deaths hit as hard as they should have. I think it was a combo writing and directing issue. Ripping off better heist films a bit more might have helped with this, too.
Sequencing and editing of some action sequences felt a bit flat. I think it’s easy for these everything’s-CG films to run into that, but its being a common problem doesn’t make it not a problem.
A couple scenes were just awful. Vader in a couple of his scenes, LOL. Could have been one of those pre- and early-YouTube Star Wars fan parodies. WTF. And I don’t even mean the one where he rages at the end.
It is one of just two that gave me any amount of some mysterious quality I think of as Star Wars Feels, and it did the best at that, even, but was dragged down too much in other areas. Coulda been excellent, ended up OK.
As for the Joker I wasn't agreeing with the critics just describing the consensus based on reviews I've heard. To me personally it did feel like it took a bit too much inspiration from the movies it was trying to pay tribute to. When does a homage becomes a copy?
The political angle is irrelevant and I agree with you on that.
For most of the audience, if they know Luke at all, it is as the whiny kid with the bad haircut from the old movies. So its fun to see him as old and grumpy. They do not care if he is some kind of space-Jesus in the expanded universe or whatever.
A "deep betrayal to the universe" of Slave Leia, Jar-Jar Binks, C3PO?
...with the addendum that it's still possible to dislike the silliness of the prequels and the new trilogy, while embracing the silliness of the OT. Rose-tinted glasses? You betcha! The OT meant the world to me when I was young.
I like Rey though. I think the accusations of her being a Mary Sue are mysogynistic -- isn't Luke's journey in the OT essentially the same? -- as is some of the backlash against the new trilogy. Which I also find boring, but not because the main characters are women or whatever.
What undid the new trilogy, in my opinion, was a couple of things:
- As a reaction against the worst excesses of the prequels, they instead stayed too close to the OT, especially during the serviceable but uninspired The Force Awakens, basically a remake of A New Hope.
- Then, it's clear JJ Abrams and Rian Johnson didn't see eye to eye (or their creative teams didn't, same thing), and so the rest of the new trilogy is essentially a flamewar between the two, with each saying "what happened before didn't matter, THIS is what matters now!" and undoing what the other did. Which was... embarrassing. Again, the OT was also full of retcons -- e.g. it's obvious Leia wasn't Luke's sister in Episode IV -- but at least it wasn't a glorified flamewar of writers actively undoing what others before had done.
I can't actually think of any films that attracted the same foaming at the mouth as you see by conservatives.
The Luke thing was the only one of those that really bugged me though.
However, the moment I walked out of the cinema and the spectacle faded and I thought about the implications of certain other things in the film, the less happy I was.
For example, a ship going lightspeed was used as a weapon in TLJ. The implications of this are pretty huge. Shooting lasers around in a universe where you can apparently have kinetic lightspeed weapons is dumb. If treated as canon, TLJ makes every other space battle in Star Wars nonsense.
Similarly, I would say in Star Wars up until TLJ, it was somewhat clear (to me at least) that space in Star Wars is not a vacuum, but more of an "ether". People get out of their spaceships on small asteroids without any sort of vac-suit and breathe fine. Sound propagates during space battles. Spaceships (their engines, their ability to open/close, etc) seem to operate in approximately the same way on a planet as they do in space. So when they used Leia's first onscreen usage of the Force (which is actually a whole 'nother thing) to totally break that system and treat outer space in Star Wars as if it's what we experience in our universe, it kinda sucked. And all for the sake of a "she's dead, actually she's not" gotcha thing.
In summary, Rian Johnson explicitly said one of his goals when making the film was to "subvert expectations". But I think there is a huge difference between "subverting expectations" and "indiscriminately shitting on existing canon", and he was definitely just doing more of the latter. Yes, it is very easy to "surprise" people when you make characters do things that they have no reason to do from previous character development and when you ignore the laws of physics (or lack thereof) that had previously been established.
In summary: Rogue One is the only Disney Star Wars film I would save from a fire. Though I also greatly enjoyed "Andor".
Could that be because you are stuck in an echo chamber and experiencing confirmation bias? "The outrage is legitimate when we do it"
Critics love these movies, because first they see lots of movies, and something doing different, even if the different doesn't really have anything behind it, is refreshing. Also, since there isn't really any plan, you can read everything behind it, which allows you to write whatever you want very easily.
Especially for the SW universe which is getting stale, and the sequel trilogy was stale from the beginning. Euroartrash allows the illusion of a new path. An illusion, since if the movie went the way some critics imagined it, a certain character had to make the other choice at the end. But you wouldn't subvert the viewer if they had.
Viewers don't like them anywhere as much - turns out trying to confuse the viewer for the sake of it doesn't make for a good experience - and it's a bad fit for a movie universe. They really picked the wrong directors for that trilogy.
Hard disagree. First, I'm familiar with many kinds of European cinema, and second, by no means is anything Star Wars artsy-fartsy, or "Euroartrash" or whatever silly made up category.
It can be bad cinema, but that's unrelated. Star Wars is, and will always be, about entertainment first; not a single Star Wars movie or TV show escapes this fact. Not a lot artsy about it.
Subverting (some) expectations has nothing to do with being artsy. And it's not like the new trilogy was particularly gutsy either; it just wasn't very good.
We agree on one essential thing though: my main criticism of Star Wars is that it's mostly played out, with very little left to say (with some honorable exceptions). Time to give this corpse of a movie universe a rest, instead of keep milking the cash cow.
In fairness, I knew the moment JJ Abrams got the role that the sequel trilogy was doomed. It's a lot more his fault than Johnson's, and a lot of the criticisms TLJ got were a consequence of the previous movie. If SW was to modernize, it needed to find new grounds, and JJ could never do it.
I was never a big fan, but I still regret to inform everyone that Disney is going to Zombify the franchise and milk the Zombie cow forever. This video is the future of Star Wars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zY9z7IP-1Q
(Yes, it's about the Simpsons, but all Zombie TV looks the same at the limit)
Perhaps his set isn't to the comedic tastes of everyone, but there's an easy solution to that: don't watch it if you don't like it.
Not even close. Luke had flaws, we saw real loss with Luke that motivated him, Luke spent a lot of time training, and even then couldn't compete with his enemies, he even lost his hand for trying!
I don't even know where you're bringing misogyny into this, seems like a crazy amount of virtue signalling to bring that up out of nowhere. I hate Gary Stu's just as much, that's what ruined Dune for me.
In reality, sequels tend to be less successful than the original, but can expect a certain audience. Since only very successful movies get sequels, sequels are still safer investments than original movies.