Shadow1980 said:
The point I was trying to make was that neither Luke nor young Anakin nor Rey are Mary Sue characters. They all have their own strengths and weaknesses that are perfectly explicable in-story. Luke blew up the Death Star by using the Force to help make the kill shot despite no real training, but he's also a farm boy who lived a relatively coddled life and wasn't physically formidable in the beginning, and whether as a young or old man he always had a defeatist, pessimistic attitude. Rey is a powerful but flawed character. Her individual strengths are clear from the film and fleshed out even more in ancillary material. It's well established that she does have experience as a pilot and is familiar first-hand with the Falcon, plus in supplemental material it's established that she also has a flight training program, so the idea of her being able to fly the Falcon (after nearly crashing it during take-off) is no less implausible than Luke being good at piloting a military fighter craft in actual combat after using what amounts to a small civilian craft (imagine going from a single-engine Cessna or and old WW2 piston plane to a modern fighter jet), even getting a confirmed kill against a trained TIE fighter pilot. Also, Rey has lived almost her whole life as a junker (more experience with machines!) on a harsh world where she almost certainly routinely encountered thugs and so had to learn to defend herself, so being proficient in hand-to-hand combat is not only unusual but is arguably expected given her circumstances. Her weaknesses are clear as well. She's hot-headed, impulsive, stubborn, naive, a bit ignorant, and can be a horrible judge of character at times (Luke was right: turning Kylo to the light did not go the way she thought it would), not to mention she almost gave herself over to the Dark Side during Luke's lessons. There are plenty of powerful characters in fiction that are nevertheless flawed individuals and therefore not Mary Sues. Rey is one of them. There's nothing uniquely or unusually "perfect" about her compared to other SW protags that makes her a Mary Sue.
Because user scores can be easily influenced by large numbers of people acting in bad faith. The Last Jedi's RT and Meta user scores were clearly subject to review bombing. It's not the first work of fiction to be subject to this, nor was it the last. Vote brigading (of which review bombing is a subset of or at least closely related to) isn't anything unusual on the internet. Just this year we saw Captain Marvel being a high-profile film subject to attempted review bombing on RT (mainly by "anti-SJWs" angry at Brie Larson; after the film came out and became a smash hit, many of its haters thought Disney bought most of the tickets for it—which could be construed as securities fraud and would be bad for business anyway—simply because it defied their belief in "get woke, go broke"). Last year there was a similar attempt to sabotage Black Panther's user review scores. Such behavior is rarely a critique of the artistic merits of a film or game or what have you, but rather exists primarily as an act of protest. BOM estimated that over 67 million tickets were sold domestically based on average ticket prices. Even allotting for 20% of that to be from repeat viewers, that's still over 53M people who went to see it in just the U.S. and Canada. The 100k people taking to RT to drop 1/10 scores amounts to less than 0.2% of that. When a film like TLJ gets a 90+% average review score from professional critics (the people who actually do study and critique film seriously as an art form and thus are more likely to be objective than fans in regards to its artistic merits) and wins multiple awards but a bunch of disgruntled fans (and maybe more than a few anti-SJWs) give it a bunch of 1/10 reviews to try to drag the average down, I think I'm going to side with the professionals. A character being portrayed in a way that isn't congruent with someone's idea of how they should be portrayed or a secondary villain not getting sufficient background information before being offed or quibbles over fictional technology does not make a film worthy of a 1/10 score. The vocal minority of people who are that irate over the film clearly feel that way not because they have legitimate criticisms of the screenplay, script, cinematography, acting, visuals, and other artistic aspects of the film, but rather because they feel it did not meet their desires as fans. "Critical dissonance" does exist, but this is ridiculous. There is nothing objectively wrong with the film that puts it in league with legitimate all-time critical flops. You know. The films that actually are cinematic atrocities. Also, The Last Jedi fares far better with user review scores elsewhere. Audience polling from CinemaScore and comScore showed the vast majority of general audiences loved it. User reviews of the Blu-ray release on Amazon give it 4/5 stars. On IMDb two-thirds of user scores give rate it a 7/10 or better (20.4% rate it 7/10, 21.2% rate is 8/10, and 24.7% rate it either a 9/10 or 10/10). The median score is a 7/10 and the weighted average score is 7.1/10. If you knock off the 6.8% of user scores that were 1/10, the non-weighted average improves from 6.8 to 7.3, better than Episodes I & II and Solo, roughly on par with Episode III, not too far behind The Force Awakens, and only a bout a point to a point-and-half behind the OT films. And looking at the percentage of users who rated it a 7/10 or better it compares well to other movies in the franchise (and far better than Episodes I & II). That's not bad. That's pretty good. Not as good as what the critics thought, but still far from the worst in the franchise, much less "worst film ever." When you don't have mass numbers of people vote brigading out of protest, a more realistic picture emerges. The vast majority of people thought it ranged from pretty good to really good. A vocal minority deciding to organize a mass protest against a film by sabotaging its average user score is not the behavior of well-adjusted adults. It's the behavior of a fringe group of people with an axe to grind. All over a movie. A movie! A movie that nearly everyone else outside their small but intensely angry circle liked. You'd swear they were a religious cult and that Rian Johnson blasphemed against their god or something. Why should I take that kind of behavior seriously? That's a rhetorical question. I shouldn't take it seriously. It's juvenile behavior and I'm not going to defend or excuse or empathize with it. Some people need to grow the fuck up. If someone feels the need to review bomb a film or dogpile anyone who defends it, then I have to question their maturity. And if they feel the need to call others things "ignorant" or "deluded" for liking and defending the movie and encouraging others to watch it, then I'm not even going to bother engaging with them because they're not worth my time. I've seen enough childish behavior on the internet to know I shouldn't trust negative user scores in these circumstances. It is not legitimate film criticism. It's a farce. |
Thanks for the effort put into that response.
First bolded:
But did you not say the people that badly criticized the movie in bad faith are a minority,the last jedi did not have that many more userreviews than the force awakens so do you really think 200000 + people (reviews from rotten tomatoes) just switched to being in bad faith after giving good ratings to the first movie ? I know that those are not always the same people but why did so many people that liked the first movie not make an effort OR rated this movie lesser than the previous one? It might have been partly affected by reviewbombing indeed but that mostly happens when a product is bad in first place.
Second bolded:
Yet the Black panther movie got overall good ratings so people did atleast find that movie good enough to give it a good rating in general aside from the reviewbombers.(that are not so effective when a movie is good in first place)
Third:
Yes the movie rating are better where there are less user ratings so that is that and the median score being 7/10 on other(less popular by the mainstream pool of star wars fans) rating mediums,yes that is understandable imo because i would give it that rating myself while finding it a flawed movie.
Fourth:
But how can that vocal minority outweigh those plenty of users have that given the movie prior to it good critique?A vocal minority of extremists protesting in scoring reviews online should not be that effective compared to the better scores if it actually was a good Star Wars movie and the example for that you could see on the Black Panther movie scorings.
Fifth:
Yes some people behave like that but it is of no use to assume that same behaviour/thoughts goes for the people that try to be fair in their critique and there are lots of them if you attempt to actually read what they try to put down in their reviews.You should not take the extreme seriously but do not let it blind you from the others that have less extreme opinions and please do not bind them together.
Sixth:
Case by case scenario,always needing to "dig in it" to know what it is about.
On a side note:
"get woke go broke" and "anti sjw" + the sensitivity against anything that contains Brie Larson has a reason but you do not always have to focus on the extremity of it to think that is what motivates most people believing in it,i dislike anti sjw people and i like them also so it just depends on the person in question.
