Alexrd said:
It doesn't normally require proving except to prequel fans, because its in a category called "common knowledge", exemplified by all of the previously-mentioned sources and examples which anyone who was alive in 1999 witnessed firsthand. Maybe one could question how negative that perception is, because I will agree that is hard to precisely measure, and I would also argue that it is not as negative as some may think, but as far as most reasonable people are concerned there is little doubt that the perception is negative overall to one degree or another. It has a bad reputation. Period.
Yes, that's the word. Bad reputation. I don't deny it. However, and as I said before, if the negative press was the majority, it wouldn't pass the 50% average rating. On any website.
Is a grade of 52% any better than 50? It it didn't have a majority of bad reviews it wouldn't score so severely low. A grade of 65% or whatever it is on IMDB, improvement, but still mediocre.
The film received mediocre reviews and was slaughtered by the major press.
No, it wasn't.
Yes it was:
http://www.secrethistoryofstarwars.com/episodeirelease.html
The major press gave it the worst ratings of all, in the early wave of reviews.
And how many were those who saw the pre-release? An handful if that much. I wouldn't call it the major press, only part of it.
This is what I mean by major press. The pre-eminant publications in the country. Rolling Stone, etc. The top 10 publications with the most clout and the most readership in the country. Probably more readers than over 50% of the remaining press. These guys tore the film to pieces. The newspapers and second tier magazines, etc. that reviewed it a week later were much kinder.
I didn't make this up. That's what happened. And overall, its critical ratings are mediocre, at best--5.2 or something by both RT and Metacritic, and confirmed by a brief perusal of major media sources.
That's the average rating. Negative reviews are in both cases the very minority, with mixed and positive reviews tied.
See, I think this is where you aren't thinking it through. Yes, that's the average.
If the average is 5.2 it CANNOT be overall liked. There are positive reviews, negative reviews, lukewarm reviews--and together, there is more negative ones if it is averaging at 5.2. The case closes here. Do you get this?
But with all the other bad press, bad reviews, and the majority of reviews which are mediocre (take a look yourself),
Once again, the majority are mixed and positive.
This simply isn't true, otherwise the film could not have scored so lowly. Are you getting this? You seem to simply see positive reviews and then take that as proof that there are more positive ones. Maybe you just don't pay attention to the negative ones. But if the film scores a tomatometer from critics of 38%--a ratio of fresh to rotten reviews--then clearly the vast, vast majority rated it rotten. And if the film averages a 5.2 rating from critics, then this means there were more who were rating the film low than there were who were rating the film high. If it scored mostly mixed and positive reviews it would have 75% tomatometer and a 7.5 rating.
the scale tips to the negative, hence this is irrelavant as far as "disproving" its negative overall reception. As far as consensus it matter little if there are numbers of fans that think the film is great when most people don't, because consensus, or overall impression, or basic public reputation, or however you want to describe it, depends on what the overall balance is. Few people would believe anyone who said the overall balance of TPM's rep is positive. The evidence backs this up.
From your site:
The best legitimate example (as opposed to web ranting) of this camp comes from Jonathan Bowen, who self-published Anticipation: The Real Life Story of Episode I (and later Revenge: The Real Life Story of Episode III ). The book tracked the hype, release and reaction of Episode I, offering a sympathetic view that the film was initially liked but then began to cultivate a snow-balling negative reaction that encouraged a negative slant.
That is my opinion. Nobody should confuse overall reception with vocal negative slant.
I was actually quoting him to prove how he was wrong. The research I have on that very page shows that it was the opposite. Read the reviews yourself there, I didn't make it up. You are cherry picking an out of context quote while literally ignoring every single fact on the page itself. The worst reviews were the earliest. The second waves of reviews were much better. So its critical reception actually got much better through May.
Anyway, as we can see on IMDB, the negativity is the minority:
The overall impression then, is one of negativity.
See above.
On IMDB, yes, sort of. Let's not apply IMDB as a representation of the planet Earth. But actually, on IMDB, the positive and negative votes are close to being equal even though there are more on the positive side, with the majority opinion of 6 and 7 being lukewarm. No one denied that, I can see it on the average rating. So are we talking about critics or audiences now? Or if we are talking about overall rep (i.e. everybody) then the poor overall reviews, jarjarbinksmustdie.com, Phantom Edit, etc., doesn't just go away because IMDB voted it mediocre to lukewarm overall. If its the big picture you have to balance this against all that stuff. You also have to balance it against the fact that its badness has become a cultural meme.
You seem to be under the impression that those average critic ratings don't matter because you can point to positive reviews. But that average rating accounts for those positive reviews, you realize, it's part of the score. Hence, if two seperate critical measurements--plus, you know, most people's impression of the same reviews from being alive at the time--as well as the tomatomer "positivity" measurement, all say the film scored lousy OVERALL, then the argument ends there. Critics, overall, gave the film a rather lousy rating. If that wasn't the case, it would not score 5.2 at both Metacritic and RT, and get a lowly 38% tomatometer rating.
With audiences, the film scores higher. 6.5 on IMDB, and a 68% tomatometer or something like that when accounting for non-professional critics as well. So then if you want to include audience polls in the mix let's average the two sets. I'll give the higher score of 68 for audiences and 52 for critics. Between them you get 60. Not terrible, but still rather poor. Ergo, the total balance of both audiences and critics rate the film as poor. Not god-awful, mind you, but certainly not positive.