Reviews are a strange phenomenon to me. There seems to be an abundance of them, and they garner a lot of controversies, yet also remain totally arbitrary and sometimes downright useless.
This post is going to be about reviews both in a professional and amateur sense. I am going to look at why they exist, why they are useful, and why we should just probably get rid of them altogether. (I know we are going in a lot of different directions).
And yes I will also be talking about Rotten Tomatoes. Most of the concepts will be transferable to different mediums, meaning that if I talk about movies the basic ideas will also be relevant for book reviewers, gaming reviews, and so on.
The first thing to consider is that “best” will always depend on what criteria you value and think is important. This is true for reviewers as well.
An example
One of my friends loves action movies; he is practically incapable of enjoying anything else. Sometimes he surprises me, but 99% of the time a movie has to have a lot of fight scenes or explosions for him to enjoy them. If I asked him what he thought of Citizen Kane, I would guess he doesn’t like it at all. To him the criteria of a good film is action and plenty of it.
Does this mean he is wrong? Well, yes for I have the objectively best opinions on anything ever (said everyone on the internet).
The criteria people think are important, are most often also what people disagree on. Every sports fan has probably had discussions regarding which team is/was the best and which player is the GOAT, and so on. It all depends on the criteria put forth.
Understanding that everyone has biases and different criteria for what makes a good film is vital to understanding the concept of reviewing.
There are two types of reviewers: the professional ones and the amateurs.
The most famous example of a professional film reviewer is the legendary duo Sisskle and Eibert. There are of course other examples, but those two seem to be the penikale.
What Rotten Tomatoes does is collect all the reviews from these professional reviewers and give them a score dependent on if this review was positive or negative. When people criticize Rotten Tomatoes and say, they gave this and that movie a 10% what were they thinking!
Well, Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t give scores, they simply collect them, don’t shoot the messenger.
The second group of people are the amateur reviewers, these people are most common on Youtube, but can be found other places. Anybody can be a reviewer, you simply have to film yourself talking about something and put it up online.
I have no real problem with amateur reviewers, but I feel most of them fall into pitfalls. These pitfalls make the review unfun and kind of useless.
Why reviews are kind of useless
Most reviews are made as consumer reviews, which means they are intended to convince the person watching whether they should go see the movie, buy the game, or read the book. Reviews are intended for people who have not experienced what you are talking about, and thus they should avoid spoilers as much as possible.
The lack of spoilers are what makes reviews inherently boring to me. What most people do when they review is they tell you the plot in the most non spoiler way, which I could just as well have read on wikipedia.
Then they talk about if they liked it or not. This is where the problem arises, for they can not explain why they like something or dislike something in any details whatsoever, for they cannot spoil anything. The result is this shallow overview of a film, book or anime. They will say things like “I really like this character, but I can’t tell you why since it would be a spoiler”. This sentiment feels like a particular bad waste of time.
A reviewer I like is Mark Kermode from England. If I am on the fence about a movie, I will check him out and see what he has to say. Not because I agree with him all the time, but because he is so good at explaining why something is good or bad to him specifically. And since I somewhat know his taste and criteria, I can easily navigate what movies to watch. This is where reviews are good if you find someone who can convey why you should read or watch something.
I have a good grasp of what I like and dislike, so I am not interested in reviews on popular things, since I already know if I am going to watch them or not. What I seek is to discover new stuff, since there is an abundance of entertainment being spitted out every day.
There are two ways of doing a review.
The first is focused on the text (meaning the work itself)
The second is focused on the reviewer (how the person reviewing thought)
You can not describe anything in detail due to fear of spoilers and you can not explain why you like something because that would also be spoilers. A review is in that regard kind of like a snake eating its own tail, it is inherently uninteresting.
This brings me to what I value.
I value in-depth Analysis of something, filled with examples of what is good and bad. I like a hybrid of the 2 mentioned before. First a look at the text and then how it worked for me and made me feel.
There seems to be a lot of so-called video essays on movies, games and anime. These essays seem to have replaced traditional reviews.
One of the things I really hate is how everyone is constantly tiptoeing around spoilers they where a fucking mindfield! – Quote ME Ralle
I think the reason people do reviews is simple, it’s easy. You do not have to do a tremendous amount of work, since you can not talk about anything spoilery. People who love movies or books who want to do content online for it can easily make a standard review.
When I first got into anime, reviews were the whole game. Everyone did them the same way. You would rate the following categories from 1-10.
- Story
- Characters
- Animation
- Music
- Enyoment
This is the worst way of reviewing anything. First of all, aren’t the characters part of the story? Isn’t enjoyment connected to the other aspects? You properly enjoyed the story, characters, animation, or something else connected to the story like the subject matter or themes, thus you can’t separate it and value it on your own.
Scoring the elements individually instead of together is a terrible idea. It would be like a food critic tasting each ingredient instead of the dish as a whole.
The problem is also when all reviews have a score attached to them. For no one seems to use scores right.
There is so much crap to watch and nobody has time to watch it all. We need reviews to tell us what is good and what is not. However, when everyone is doing reviews, reviews themselves become more content to consume and thus reviews are once again like a snake eating its own tail.
Rotten Tomatoes is a good visual indicator for the average perception of the critics. It is easy to scan their page and see what is considered good and bad.
Some movies are critic-proof though. Take the transformers they get worse and worse, critics hate them and people with more than two brain cells also seem to hate them. But despite the constant bad reviews they still sell a lot of tickets. No matter how much the critics give them crap, they still provide. The opposite is also true, every Marvel movie with the exception of one or two always gets a high score on rotten tomatoes despite being really terrible.
In conclusion, I feel reviews are a totally shallow exercise, which is a result of the excessive need to avoid spoilers.