A few months ago a Mauler fan gave their definition of a bad movie, that being any movie where over 60% of the runtime has problems. Obviously this is ridiculous, 60% is a really random-ass number to pull, and how you would even measure this is beyond me. But I think it kind of says a lot about what that style of criticism is trying to prove.
These types of criticisms are essentially big long lists of mean things you can say about a movie. And the more “problems” you can list off about a movie, the worse it is.
But that style of critique doesn’t address how people actually experience movies. It’s not like when you’re watching a movie you’re counting all the bads you notice, and if it passes a threshhold it’s a bad movie. People experience movies in the big picture.
And this style of critique is completely incapable of addressing the big picture, because a character arc is more than just a combination of character moments. A narrative is more than jut a combination of plot points. Et cetera.
If you wanted to criticize Luke’s character in TLJ in this format, you could only really look at the individual character moment, when the thing that’s actually controversial is the overarching story.
But even making that comparison is way too generous, because they’re not starting from the top down, trying to criticize Luke’s character by finding individual character moments that bug them. They’re going from the bottom up, making a huge, long list of everything that could be considered at the very least an imperfection. And none of it ever amounts to anything.
They’re not criticizing with a fine tooth comb, they’re not catching lots of problems. They’re catching lots of meaningless nitpicks and missing actual criticism.
There’s a lot of people who say that people only care about these problems in movies they already didn’t like, and happily ignore them in movies they do like. I think this is a bad argument, if a movie has problems you probably don’t like it, kind of by definition. But looking at it at from this angle kind of makes that argument make sense a little: These aren’t actual problems, whether or not you like a movie has absolutely nothing to do with them. You’ll recognize these sorts of “problems” to dunk on a movie you already like, but either aren’t motivated to seek out these sorts of “problems”, or you aren’t receptive to them when you find them, because you already like the movie and they don’t actually matter.
Yeah, this is pretty much correct. It’s why Mauler’s metric for judging media is so skewed. He starts off by viewing a movie as a hypothetical Perfect 10, then detracts points based on how many supposed errors he finds. But that’s an awful way to judge a complex piece of art. And it’s arrogant to start calling a movie “objectively bad” based on that metric. I see that now.