Can a Prequel EVER be a Good Film?

The entire chain of logic hinges on "art is the expression of creativity." Is it? Michaelangelo's David is not especially creative, it is simply a monument to skill and dedication.

At the very least, the idea that originality should be given priority over all other considerations when evaluating art is, itself, not an objective claim. It's purely axiomatic. It cannot be justified: it is simply a thing you believe, or not. It may be a reasonable thing, may even be something I personally agree with, but it is not self-evident or self-justifying the way logic is.

This is kind of at the bottom of all these disagreements: you can sorta-kinda be objective once you've settled on a standard, but the choice of said standard is, itself, never objective, and never can be.

Ya, placing originality as the most important element in evaluating a piece of art, is on its face a purely subjective approach to art criticism.

And even if we accept this as some kind of fact, we are now at the crossroads of 'is all originality created equal'?

Not a great start for Team Objectivist

Yes, that's what I was getting at. Specifically I had meant your views that art is objectionable...I wondered if you were relating that as your own personal view for your own self...or as a universal truth for us all. Which you just answered. Thanks that's what I was wondering.

So you've got like a dozen people writing you very long replies, so I'm not trying to pile on. But I think this is the issue I take with the idea of objective criticism: first, just because something has a quality does not mean it is easy (or even possible) to quantify that and make it measurable. And secondly, quantifying something with many factors includes some inherent weighting of those factors. I may not care how accurate an accent is if the emotion is there, while another person might consider the correct accent for a character to be something of a dealbreaker. There is no universal metric for what makes good acting (I'd love to see your---or anyone's!--rubric for good acting, spelled out with various elements and the weight you'd give each element), and so I think the best you can have is general consensus and an open mind.

It's also possible for two people with extensive knowledge and understanding of any kind of art to fundamentally disagree on its quality, so a difference in agreement is not always down to one person just not being educated/experienced enough.

What about Rotten Tomatoes?

Yeah, this is one of several other objections I considered mentioning, before deciding to just focus on the first, most fundamental objection. But even past that, we have issues like this, with measuring originality.

You can make (and others have made) the case that there is no such thing as originality. "Nothing new under the sun," as they say. Things that seem original are really just interesting remixes, or things that have not been seen for a long time, or modern retellings of such-and-such. Originality is technically a non-modifiable term, even though I recognize that's a losing battle, linguistically, but our feeling of "how original" something is is often just a reflection of how much we're aware of in the first place, anyway.

If I put 100 film critics in a room and said, "Hey, raise your hand if you thought Lincoln was worth seeing" and then counted the hands, that's Rotten Tomatoes. It doesn't distinguish between people saying "It was alright" and people saying "It's the best film ever made!". It's one form of a consensus tracker, but you can't say it's any kind of objective measure of a film's quality. Further, not every film is reviewed by the same number of critics, so it's not even always a percentage out of the same total people.

To take one example: Blade Runner has 131 reviews, while Blade Runner 2049 has 443 reviews. Further, one of the reviews for Blade Runner appears to just be two paragraphs about the film on a list of "10 Movies About Robots". So the standard for what a review even means seems a bit slippery.

I think it's an example of something that looks objective or scientific because it involves numbers and percents, but it's just poll results. And you're not even polling the same people each time.

No, it is an objective measure of observable responses to the film. You can make of that what you will.

Tell me what you make of this review of Blade Runner (and this is the entire review, not an excerpt):

Ridley Scott took the meat-machine nexus further in this free adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968). Here, artificially engineered Nexus-6 replicants (or ‘skinjobs’), barely distinguishable from humans, serve as soldiers and sexbots on the off-world colonies. As four of these have become fugitives to Earth, hoping to meet their makers in a desperate race to override the limited lifespan hardwired into their programming, ultimately their humanity will come to be defined precisely by their mortality.

Rick Deckard (Harrison Ford), the ‘blade runner’ assigned to hunt them down, is a noirish antihero – really little more than a slave catcher and cold-blooded assassin – with his own humanity being repeatedly called into question. Meanwhile lead replicant Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer) articulates to an ocular geneticist an aspiration familiar to every visionary filmmaker: “If only you could see what I have seen with your eyes.”

That's precisely why you turn to RT. They give you average critic scores but also an audience score. It ain't perfect, but it gives you some idea!

Order and consistency are fine in life, but different people have different versions of order and consistency. I consistently dislike westerns. I'm sick of them. If I were to review a western movie, the best it could be on a 0 - 5 scale, would be a weak 3. To me, objectively, 3 is the best a western could be. I'm consistent on that.

We all carry those biases, whether we are aware of them or not. There's no objective measure in any art, much less movies and don't even get me started on systematic cultural biases. Was VanGogh better than Rembrandt? I have no idea. Is a well made horror movie better than a realistic contemporary drama or a hyperactive action movie? Again, I don't know.

It all reminds me of a philosophy professor, who opined that "Opinions are like a**holes....we all have them, they all stink".

I'd go with the idea that, as a critic of anything, you find an audience that appreciates your preferences and biases. Were I doing movie reviews for a living, I'd have to find a publication of web site that had like minded fans, otherwise, I'd be preaching the value of horror movies to people that don't like them, etc.

I said I don't think it's possible to quantify a film's quality, and you asked me about Rotten Tomatoes.

Rotten Tomatoes quantifies the general reaction of a varying group of people in quite the range of types of film criticism. (And as you can see from the "review" I posted, the degree to which it's even criticism is questionable at some points). I'm not saying that doesn't correlate in some way to a film's quality, but I don't think it's anywhere near quantifying it.

Rotten Tomatoes deleted the forums without warning, so I hate them for that alone

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IMDb
Letterboxd

It was a completely useless website long before that even happened.


It's only fitting they erased the forums. And maybe even proper, considering they have no right to anything that was of that high quality attached to their shit platform. A certainly don't want anything I have ever written associated with them.

Numerical consensus is OK as long as you realize its limitations and are clear who is doing the voting. It's just an average. It's not good at rating outliers or innovators. It mainly establishes an average.

Oh, for sure. I have no problem with it. I just think it's nowhere near being an objective measure of a film's quality. I feel the same way about things like IMDb scores.

Like all open-ended, un-defined ratings, it does have value, at least in terms of popularity, but, of course, it depends on who's rating. Is it quality? I have no idea. That's the whole quandary.

I didn't say (or even imply) that it was quantifying a film's quality, it's quantifying the response to it.

I mean, one can say -- very objectively -- that Citizen Kane is considered one of the greatest films ever made (which doesn't mean everyone has to agree with that), or that most people consider Plan 9 From Outer Space one of the worst films ever made (and again, maybe not everyone will agree with that).

I said: just because something has a quality does not mean it is easy (or even possible) to quantify that and make it measurable.
You said: What about Rotten Tomatoes?

So . . . yes, I would say that's exactly what you implied.

Right, but we're having a conversation about whether it's possible to quantify the quality of a film, and there's a big gap between considered and is. Critical response might be an adjacent metric to that, but it's not the same thing at all. And you don't need to look any further than films like Blade Runner or even something like Showgirls where critical consensus has shifted to see that gap.

No, I didn't imply that, you just inferred it (incorrectly).

The point was (evidently I have to spell everything out) that when you can't "measure" something directly, you go with some other thing that at least serves as a reflection of the perceived quality.

There is a relationship between a film's quality and its perceived quality - and as we all know, sometimes perceived quality can shift over time (or depending on other factors)