Jay said:
I don’t agree with people who think TLJ is a good Star Wars story/movie, but that doesn’t mean they’re making excuses for something they know deep down isn’t good, which I think is what many would call an “apologist” today.There are contexts in which “apologist”/“apologetics” doesn’t carry that sense. It just presupposes that a given thing has been attacked, and so someone else is defending it. It makes no presumption as to whether the attack OR the defense is, in itself, right or wrong.
I’m accustomed to using the term positively in my own circles, and so I wasn’t making a veiled insult to anyone who likes TLJ.
Which is pretty much what I said.
Ha, citing the RT audience score unironically, that’s funny.
I’m guessing you have “valid” data that supports your take on things.
Do you? In general I wouldn’t trust an audience score on a site like that. Which is to say nothing about the reports of concentrated bot reviews. Even if you think there’s no way that could have been the case (because it’s so unbelievable) there was still a campaign to lower its score. Plus the simple fact that hardcore fans that got mad are way more likely to rate the movie on RT than the casual fans who vastly outnumber them. When you consider the high cinema score, it’s starts to paint a different picture.
Even if you’re skeptical of these things, it’s not hard to see how the RT score might be slightly biased in one direction. That considered, it’s weird to use it as proof that a majority of fans disliked the film when that score is basically right in the middle, even with that negative volunteer bias.
So yeah, I think it’s pretty silly to take any stock in the RT audience score, and you doing so did legitimately give me a laugh.
So no then. Got it.
If you chose not to listen to very easily understood concepts, sure.
Failing that, I think the CinemaScore and IMDb rating will suffice.
I understood what you said just fine. It’s just that what you said didn’t answer my question. I asked you for data you considered valid and you provided none. But you provided data this time, so I’ll address it.
IMBD’s less than stellar TLJ rating of 7.4 is hardly a smash hit (do you pat your kids on the back when they get a C?), the MetaCritic score is mostly positive at 85, and audience reviews are split down the middle. Sounds suspiciously like…RT.
CinemaScore polls viewers on opening night, which provides multiple avenues for skewing the results in either direction (limited sample size, not enough time to analyze what they just saw, etc.).
I don’t see anything about these methods that makes them a more reliable or scientific predictor of a film’s quality than RT, especially since what I’m seeing on IMDB backs up what RT says (critics like or love it, audiences seem split but veer into the negative).