I'm Sick and Tired of Politics Influencing Movie Reviews

Once upon a time, there lived a very political boy. He firmly supported the Republican Party and believed that their ideas for American policy were fundamentally superior to those of their Democratic counterparts. He was about as patriotic as could be and studied American history in a classical setting, which admittedly has yielded and still yields a lot of fruit for him today. He practically worshipped the Constitution and put a lot of misplaced hope in it. And for all intents and purposes, he saw himself voting red all across the board when he finally would be old enough to vote. But then he grew up. And the more cynical and thoughtful man was not pleased with what he saw. Now, he was far from happy with Black Lives Matter's loving and peaceful rampage through Portland in the summer of 2020, so the Democrats had no hope of winning him over, but after the embarrassing debacle that was January 6th, he finally said goodbye to the Republican party as well and struck out into the ideological wilderness to find another love.

For now, he's a tenant in the movie critic's camp.

I'm sick and tired of politics influencing movie reviews. I am. And I say that as someone who is completely guilty of letting politics influence his judgement of movies in the past. Call me a hypocrite if you will: such is the nature of growth. I'm sick and tired of The New York Times and Vox giving an excellent and also socially-conscious movie like Get Out rave reviews that include every left-wing buzzword you can think of while flimsily throwing out critical generalizations that make me embarrassed of my aspired profession, failing to say anything of value about its actual structural merits. I'm sick and tired of the Google review feature and generally right-wing reviewers like The Critical Drinker worshipping that second-rate and unsubtle mess that is Sound of Freedom while making the exact same mistake they so often accuse Democrats of. I feel like I'm screaming some of these observations that feel so obvious to me into an unfeeling void at times. No, it's worse than that. I feel like I'm screaming the observations to an angry and reactionary crowd of people who are all too busy fighting a culture war between themselves to even think to themselves that something's not right here.

Look, it's not like I don't hold convictions. If you've read my blog for any time, you'll know that I tack a Bible verse onto the end of all of my reviews, if that gives you an idea of the kind of person I am. I merely lost faith in the political process at a younger age than most do, and the further I get from the ever-worsening divide between the political right and the political left, the less I want to go back. I only have one life, and I don't particularly want to spend it angry and afraid over how much my groceries and gas cost or whether this gun or that gun is legal or not. And so unfortunately for me, it's hard to find any field where this divide is more prevalent than in movie reviews. Don't worry, I'll give you examples, although if you read the news, you probably already know I'm right. To pick on Vox again because they've made themselves an easy target, here's an excerpt from their review of Sound of Freedom:

"The details come from an anonymous letter, first reported on by Vice and then made public by independent Utah journalist Lynn Packer on Packer's YouTube Channel on September 17. According to the letter, Ballard’s departure was prompted by an investigation into a sexual harassment complaint involving seven women filed against him by an OUR employee. The letter contains horrific allegations against Ballard, including that he used the aims of OUR — saving sex trafficking victims — to “deceitfully and extensively groom” female employees into role-playing as his “wife” during rescue trips. He would then use the ruse of being husband and wife to allegedly coerce them into performing sexual acts with him, including showering together, sharing a bed, and “doing ‘whatever it takes’ to save a child."

That's....a lot of conjecture, perhaps enough to warrant a lawsuit if it's inaccurate. And I'll concede that Ballard has been subject to a lot of scrutiny - about 99% of it occurring after and only after Sound of Freedom blew up, so I'm going to make a judgment call and go so far as to say that most if not all of his accusers are only trying to smear him because his movie angered them. In short, is Vox reviewing Sound of Freedom, or are they reviewing Tim Ballard? Their bias isn't only painfully obvious. It's practically the point of the article. It's obvious that they were never going to give this movie a chance. Now, the right is less prevalent as far as online movie reviews go, but let's take a look at the New York Post, a considerably more conservative outlet. While not a review, one piece on the live-action The Little Mermaid starts with this:

"Ariel the Little Mermaid is part of your … historically inaccurate … world. 'The Little Mermaid' is being criticized by a prominent diversity advocate for its erasure of slavery in the Caribbean."

Talk about playing your hand too soon. Granted, this isn't the main review of the movie, but my point stands. As a general rule, movies tend to get at least a +10% bump on Rotten Tomatoes for featuring left-adjacent talking points and conversely get review-bombed into oblivion for doing the same thing on any crowd-sourced feature. It's frustrating because I think it leads to political but legitimately good movies being dismissed by 50% of the population, or worse, legitimately bad movies being praised by especially second-rate or even skilled critics for their "daring themes" because the main character happens to have two daddies. I personally have found movies highlighting varying points of view to be fantastic. I loved Get Out, it's practical sermons about racism and all. I loved Waltz With Bashir, a movie that many on Letterboxd small-mindedly dismissed as "Israeli Defense Force propaganda." Though I do find myself annoyed by heavy-handed political messaging in movies, I rarely discount a movie merely because of its messaging, and I conversely never praise it merely because of its messaging.

I believe that tying a political slant to your movie reviews is practically limiting. It limits the ways you can interpret a movie's merits. It limits the conclusions you can come to about a movie. And may I point out that political journalists are not movie critics? If you read enough of the types of articles these types of journalists write, you'll probably see that they're little more than glorified Google reviews with an absolutely titanic appeal to authority courtesy of their publisher name and an even larger bias to go with it. But even professional critics don't entirely escape some of these less-than-desirable habits, and then we wonder why audience members don't trust us.

As someone who has devoted countless hours to reviewing movies, it's time to demand better from movie reviewers. Trust isn't earned, it's given. I'm sick and tired of politics influencing movie reviews and slowly poisoning an art form I love in an attempt to push a wide variety of agendas. It's appropriation at its very lowest, the lamest and most obvious of Trojan Horses. And to be abundantly clear, I'm not necessarily against a movie that contains a political message. I'm against a reviewer using that message to make a point when, instead, they should be trying to say something of value about this movie's or that movie's technical parts. Anyone can find a worldview in a film. I'm not impressed by amateurs or even professionals who can tell me why they think a movie's commentary on capitalism makes it a good movie or not. Show me that you understand its moving parts. On the most fundamental of levels, this is what separates the boys from the men when it comes to film criticism.

And to paraphrase one of my favorite songs, I've seen the boy, but where is the man? I ain't even seen him yet.

Romans 16:17-18