Critical Consensus

Scott Hardie | June 24, 2011
EW's critic Owen Gleiberman wrote a clever article this week about whether film critics subconsciously seek consensus, especially for "bad" movies. I enjoyed Gleiberman's sense of humor, but as for his main idea, I think the Internet may be the one major factor that he discounts. The rise of critical-consensus web sites like Metacritic and Rotten Tomatoes have had two effects:

1) They have made it very easy for all critics to be lumped together as if they are one single hive mind. In the past, critics all piled on certain movies like Ishtar and Heaven's Gate, even Godzilla as Gleiberman mentioned. But now we have a way to quantify the effect and see just which movies merited scores of 20% or less, so we now notice a "hive mind" where we might not have before.

2) It's boring to scan those sites reading the collective agreement, but its more fun to scan them looking for the rare outliers, the few critics who bucked the trend. As a result, those critics are harshly scolded by anonymous commenters on the web, as Gleiberman experienced two years ago. For a movie particularly popular with certain fanboys, like The Dark Knight, it's even turned into death threats against those critics who merely called it "good" instead of "outstanding," their break with the critical consensus was so minor. I've read that it's now something of a sport among maladjusted commenters, waiting for the first negative (or positive) review of a widely celebrated (or panned) movie, then pouncing on that unwitting critic with as much public vitriol as they can, for the crime of not going along with the herd.