For many years now, I have been an avid movie goer & have had the pleasure of living through what I would consider the true glory years of cinema going. So much has come & gone since I first entered the theatre screen for the first time in 1984, my first big screen exposure being BMX BANDITS... yeah... I know...
I've been lucky enough to see Peter Venkman get slimed, Doc Brown go crazy over 1.21 Gigowatts, watch Supergirl take the Ammegahedroen back to Argo City, See Woody tell Buzz he is JUST a toy, watch Jack's Joker say BOO to Kim Bassinger.... the list is endless.... recent years have brought me some of my greatest cinema experiences ever.... Avengers, The Dark Knight, Ex Machina. But there's something wrong right now with how we view movies..
Everything has become a bragging rights contest over which is better, more so than ever before. Sure you had those fundamental vintage sci fi rivalries in the seventies between Star Wars & Star Trek, yea you had Ninja Turtles vs He Man in the eighties... & yeah, who didn't argue over Sega & Nintendo?! But adult rivalries over make believe characters?!! Come on.... it's laughably ridiculous. How can you take yourself seriously when you are getting a buzz out of Marvel doing better then DC? Didn't you ever want to jump into the sky when you were a child like Superman? To feel like you could save the world? Somewhere along the line with these laughably pathetic hard on's for one company over another, people have forgotten the innocent thrill of what these characters, all of them, represent.
Now though.... now we have Rotten Tomatoes 🍅.... the bastion of everything that is warped about our movie culture & how we discuss it. You know what the first thing people say to me is every time I bring RT up?
"You don't seem to get it!! RT doesn't give any scores, it's an aggregator, a calculator of scores, to give a balanced perspective of what the average critic & movie goer think! They don't give any scores!"
Well, diddly ducks, what a revelation.... yes, I'm acutely aware of that fact. You see though, they DO give a score in actuality.... because that ridiculous, pointless & quite frankly unbalanced percentage can literally make or break a film based on whether the scores they, the people who work for RT, complied for that movie are favourable or not. That, in itself, shows the utter pointless & unbalanced nature of the site. Again, people will argue that if you don't like RT, you are simply a "butt hurt fanboy".... this is UTTER playground talk & gives no credence to the people who truly believe that film should be based on the individual experience, as it always has been.
Thats just it though, in the age of the keyboard evangelist, it's become far too easy to deride a movie simply because you are jumping on the bandwagon of what seems "in" to say so. I've known of people quite frankly frightened to admit they like BvS, for fear of being ridiculed online..... ?!! I mean, this is just getting ridiculous. Again, people will tell you "if you can't stand the heat of the Internet, then get out of the furnace".... another ridiculous cop out. You should be able to proclaim your love whatever you feel without being harassed, now matter how fresh or bloody pointlessly rotten a film gets measured. But this IS the effect RT has... & make no mistake, it's intentional.
When I first watched BvS, a film I had no initial interest in watching, I came out thinking "you know what? It had its flaws, but I was entertained." Similarly, when I saw the extended edition, my respect for its beautiful cinematography, gorgeous score & very brave choices amid some questionable script choices brought me me to the ultimate conclusion, once & for all.... I should be proud to like something I got such a great experience from & not feel a pariah no matter how many people dislike it. Good for them, you can't change how I feel. That is fundamentally what RT wants to do though.... RT has simply become a site for fanboys & trolls to use for bragging rights. People will tell you, it's there for the simple reason to give people a measured aggregator of whether a film is good or not, to get an informed opinion, before you spend your hard earned cash on a potential dud...
But you see that's the whole reason Rotten Tomatoes is simply pointless. Yes, it's giving reviews & scores of movies, which we've been party to for many years before the internet..... but that simple little percentage score they give is eroding away at the very fundamental thing that makes movie going so special... objectivity.
i have no alegience to any make believe characters. I happen to enjoy the majority of what has come my way so far. I have no problem AT ALL with people disliking something which I admire. What I do have a problem with is movie objectivity being replaced with a tomato score which is, in my humble opinion, fruitless, unbalanced in the way it calculates the combined 7.5's, A-C's, 20%'s to 90%'s... & ultimately just a total joke to the medium of movie making.
The question is... what do you guys think?