Here's Why I Fell Out Of Love With The Audience Review

I hear some questions asked more often than I do others, and one of the most commonly asked ones has to be this: Why do movie critics hate everything? This is a common misconception that I'd like to address with a rhetorical question. If we hate movies as much as you think we do, why do we bother watching hundreds of them a year? Simply put, we critique movies because we love them, probably more than anybody else on the planet does. I am personally passionate about cinema, and I'm sure I speak for every last film critic out there when I say that they are, too. You may have heard of something called The Critic-Audience Divide, and I want to spend some time discussing why I'm not even close to as impressed by audience reviews as I used to be, regardless of how many pieces have been written on blogs just like this one about how the audience is really right and the critics are the ones getting it all wrong, which is kind of like a vegan city slicker saying that hunters don't really know anything about hunting. Please don't hear me say I'm questioning the audience's intelligence. I'm sure many of them are very smart. However, I am raising several objections to the relatively commonly held belief that they are somehow more knowledgeable about movies than actual movie critics. I don't think it's a coincidence that, generally speaking, the more you learn about how the moving parts of movies move, the more you think like a critic.

I want to make something abundantly clear - I understand fully that audiences represent a much larger and more diverse demographic than critics. I understand fully that their consensus will be far more culturally prevalent than our critical one, and some would say that this would make it a more considerable viewpoint, especially when it clashes with the critical consensus. However, popularity does not necessarily equal truth, especially when the critical sample will always be smaller than the popular one: you don't need four years of schooling or study of cinema history and rules to leave a review on Google or IMDb, but good luck getting a job as a critic at a newspaper without those certifications. Also, I want to make a clarification. When I use the term audiences in this movie, I'm not painting with as broad a brush as you may think. I'm primarily targeting the Google User Reviews demographic, a feature with which I have some serious beef.

On top of this, audiences are far less flexible than movie critics. They go into a movie with an idea made up in their mind of what it should and shouldn't be, and if the movie doesn't draw within the lines of what they expect, they will more often than not leave a poor review. Three excellent movies that perfectly demonstrate this effect are Gravity, Hereditary, and The Babadook, instances where I was not just put off but outright offended by what I found to be inappropriately low audience scores. Going into a movie with an idea in your head of what it should or shouldn't be is entirely antithetical to the purpose of art. Art is not safe, and great art is often surprising. If we're not given the picture we expect, we should appreciate the surprise rather than complain about the subversion, especially if the pencil lines are straight, the colors are blended beautifully, and the features are perfectly drawn.

Third, almost everything a critic notices in a movie will fly completely over the heads of the audience. I would know. I used to be an audience member. However, just because the pacing of a movie doesn't matter to Joe Smith doesn't mean it's not an objective indicator of that movie's quality. How can you expect to give a reasoned indication of the quality of a movie if you're not familiar with the criteria behind determining its quality? I go into a movie with a set list of rules that can be applied to any film, except experimental ones. You could sum these rules up with some questions. Some of my favorites are "Is this movie concise, or is it adding unneeded fluff?" and "Are the characters multi-faceted, or are they stereotypes or poorly-acted?" and "Is this movie emotionally intelligent or simply emotionally forceful?" Critics are not out of touch with how general audiences think so much as audiences are unfamiliar with the fundamental facets of criticism. Look at Where the Crawdads Sing for a good example of this effect. This movie is beautifully shot and emotionally resonant, and I can see why many audiences loved it - they didn't notice the rushed pacing, lazy exposition, and disorganized narrative flow like I and other critics like me did because they don't know how to identify these things, nor do they care to. But again, that doesn't mean those things aren't there. A spade is a spade, even if it's hiding in the weeds where few bother to look.

Fourth, audiences will often hate movies they find boring, even if they're objectively well-written (see Killers of the Flower Moon), and love movies they find exciting, even if they're objectively poorly written (see Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen). A slow story told well is still a well-told story, and a fast and exciting story told poorly is still a poorly-told story, regardless of how many endorphins get released in your brain. Fifth, critic review averages cannot be review-bombed. In contrast, audience review averages are probably the perfect example of this phenomenon, which can and sometimes does render the score average completely unreliable. One common complaint I see about film critics is that they let their political leanings influence their movie reviews, and I actually agree with this. In fact, this would be a perfectly legitimate complaint if audiences weren't guilty of the exact same thing. I want to think I've grown past this habit, and God forbid I ever go back to it. Audiences calling critics politically-influenced is a lot like the pot calling the kettle black. Going back to the idea of review bombing, the culture war we're currently involved in has inflated this effect to a ridiculous degree, further delegitimizing the audience review because their sample size is just that much larger.

Lastly, hyperbole isn't the worst crime. It's a crime I myself am guilty of. Still, audience reviews are not bound by the level of relative politeness that journalism dictates, often blowing this effect completely out of the water. You will never see me use laughing emojis in my reviews. You will never see me personally ridicule actors in my reviews. You will never see me accusing producers of paying critics off in my reviews. Chalk it up to a level of journalistic professionalism and politeness, but in recent years, I have observed hyperbole used time and again as a replacement for genuine thoughtfulness and intentional measuredness in audience reviews. Both intellectualism and emotion leave an impact on a reader, but one of those things makes you think more deeply about what you just watched, while the other settles with hammering in a surface-level feeling over and over again.

I have recently been taking steps back from watching tons of movies. I won't be posting as much as I used to anymore. But I had to give my two cents on this issue. If you're reading this, consider it your sign to start studying film criticism. Also, I want to make one last statement: I by no means know everything there is to know about movies, and I don't want this article to sound like a high and mighty condemnation so much as a learning opportunity. I know enough to know that I started out thinking like an audience member, and think very differently now that I've put my nose to the grindstone. I had to do a lot of deconstruction of my beliefs about movies and how to review them when I began researching this field in earnest, and my encouragement to you would be this: assume you know everything, and you'll learn nothing you don't think you need to. But assume you know nothing, and you'll learn everything you didn't know you wanted to.

Proverbs 20:15