So, as an aspiring author and potential future content creator, it’s pretty much premature career suicide to slander critics before I’ve even released anything. However, after the release of the Warcraft movie and the immense gap in opinion between critics’ reviews and reviews from those who simply watch movies for enjoyment, I thought it might be worth taking a bit of a closer look as to who critics are and why we value their opinions.
So firstly, I’ll admit two things – I’m biased towards thinking Warcraft is going to be good, and I’ve also not seen the movie yet. This is not a review of the movie. For all I know, the critics could be right, and the movie could be awful. This is also not a panic post, where I desperately try to justify to myself that the movie is amazing and that the critics, therefore, have to be wrong. Movies don’t mean that much to me. I’m sure Warcraft has plenty of flaws. But something about the way critics are treating this just rubs me the wrong way. It’s hard to believe that a movie can be a worthless piece of trash from 5 people when 500 more are arguing its merits, and I’m then told that those 500 people are wrong because they’re not the super special 5 critics who know if a movie is good or not.
Critics exist, I think, for two main reasons. They exist because people want to know if a movie is worth going to see before they spend their money, and they exist because whenever a creative mind produces a narrative, an academic mind becomes curious as to its workings, wants to deconstruct it and reconstruct under various different perspectives and fully comprehend the subtexts and intertexts woven throughout. I do not see the latter in most Warcraft reviews. I see someone who has been paid to sit down and watch a movie, and has gone into it believing that it’s one big advertisement (as they may believe all videogame movies are) and are on some level personally offended that another industry would use theirs as a platform off of which to propel themselves. With this in mind, then, I believe they’ve gone in to the movie with every intent of tearing that movie down, magnifying its weaknesses and refusing to believe that any sort of decent narrative exists within the movie in front of them.
Or maybe it just sucks. Maybe it’s a solid 5/10. But the amount of people who have left that movie singing its praises on social media is what’s caused me to eye these critics suspiciously in the first place. Fans of the franchise and newcomers alike call it a decent movie at the very least, and some critics response to this has been an elitist one. If you’d rather not give them the click, here’s about the sum of it:
“Warcraft” is currently quite rotten on critic aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, sporting a 22 percent rating. Just four of 18 reviews were considered “Fresh,” though even those were rather tempered. Maybe the most positive thing we actually read during this roundup process was: “‘Warcraft’ doesn’t suck.”
It would seem that if you don’t get paid to see a movie, your opinion on it isn’t justified. If you enjoyed the movie, and felt like saying that you enjoyed it without going into an extensive 700 word review about it, then critics hate you, because you’re the problem. Movies are no laughing matter. All you’re doing is encouraging directors like Duncan Jones to continue slandering the movie industry with thinly veiled attempts at marketing. I am, of course, embellishing here, for that is no direct quote, but I’ll give my left leg and the pinky toe on my right if that’s not the attitude that some critics currently have.
It’s an abuse of power. Trying to kill a movie with your influential ways for prejudiced or even completed misguided (more on that here) reasons completely discredits your opinion and calls in to question all other reviews that you produce, in my opinion. If there’s an ulterior motive behind your slandering then you’re no better than a politician… only now, it’s about killing a genre of movie that you don’t like instead of doing something significant like attempting to steer a parliamentary decision. Bravo.
Perpetually Perturbed 