Rotten Tomatoes: a monument to all your sins

I thought I'd do something different from my usual with this post. Rather than a review or a news post, I've decided to explain what I think about review aggregation site Rotten Tomatoes. You all know what it is, and almost certainly use it. I use it quite often, since it's a really helpful archive of reviews and makes finding an individual critic's opinion on a film much easier than it might be otherwise.

And I don't like it.

I'm well aware of how convenient it is to have all the reviews in one place, but on balance, I think Rotten Tomatoes is detrimental to the industry and unhelpful to consumers. You will have noticed that, in my reviews, I do not assign scores. This is because I don't believe a complicated opinion about a film can be adequately expressed by an arbitrary numerical value. I might think a film a failure, and yet interesting enough to watch anyway, like Sucker Punch (but more on that later); or I might think a film technically superb, but so dull that that I can't in good conscience recommend it, like Citizen Kane (on a narrative level: plodding, pretentious, glacially paced even for the time, and tremendously hypocritical on Orson Welles' part. On a technical level, however, one of the most important films ever made). How am I to rate these films? I can't. Not accurately, anyway. Now, I have no problem with other critics assigning scores, because if you don't have time to read the whole review it can be helpful to be able to quickly see their opinion. The problem with Rotten Tomatoes is that it aggregates these scores and gives you a percentage of critics who enjoyed the film. This is a serious problem, as most people view the Tomatometer as a simple indicator of how good a film is; the higher the percentage, the better the film.

Lex says it better than I ever could. At a glance, you can tell that this idea is critically flawed. The recent Star Trek reboot has a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, which most people would take to mean that the film is excellent. It's not. It's certainly not bad, but it's nothing more or less than a competent space opera. There's nothing remarkable at all about it, no ambition, no commentary on the human condition which used to be Star Trek's hallmark. District 9 has a 91% rating; according to the Tomatometer, Star Trek is better than District 9. Again, refer to the picture above. District 9 is better directed, has better action, more interesting characters, and there's a purpose to the whole thing sorely lacking from Star Trek.

Let's now look at Sucker Punch in reference to Star Trek. I honestly don't know if I enjoyed this film or not. It's certainly not lacking for flaws: the plot is nearly incomprehensible at times, the characters are two-dimensional at best, and while the fight sequences are very, very good, the amount of slow-motion used is just ridiculous. And yet, in spite of all this, I can't convince myself it's a bad film. There's creativity here, ambition, the desire to be great, sorely lacking from Star Trek, and as a result, while it might be a technically inferior film, I would much rather watch Sucker Punch again, simply because it's interesting. To me, an ambitious film that doesn't quite come together is far preferable to one that sets low standards for itself and succeeds according to those standards. Sucker Punch has a 22% rating on the Tomatometer, and as a result, most people are going to pass it by, when, flaws or no, it really ought to be seen.

And whom do I blame for the unhelpfulness of the aggregate score? The consumer. The person who isn't interested in finding out why a film is good, but simply wants a binary yes/no answer to the question of whether or not they should go and see it. It is because of this that film criticism, as journalism in its own right, is dying. Film criticism is not mere consumer advice, but should be an interesting read on its own merits, picking apart the film and revealing things that you might have missed otherwise. It can be entertaining as a piece of writing, rather than just useful advice; go and read some of Roger Ebert's reviews of bad films. Many of them are hilarious, and considerably more entertaining than the film itself. People however, by and large, read film reviews as they would read a review for a vacuum cleaner: they simply want to know if it works or not. Rotten Tomatoes provides this. People assume that, if it has a high rating, it must be good, but as I hope to have demonstrated, this isn't necessarily true. Nor does it take into account films which might be guilty pleasures, such as G.I. Joe: by any reasonable standard, an awful film, but it's fun enough that it doesn't really matter.

So, I urge you, do not use the Tomatometer alone to judge if a film is good. Instead, go into the review archive, the thing Rotten Tomatoes does right, and read some actual reviews. Find a critic or two whose opinions you trust and agree with, and, when you're trying to decide whether to go and see a film, see what that critic thinks, not what the Tomatometer says.