The movies you listed fail in a different way. There are plenty of explosions and fight scenes in The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. They're just made awesome from the start. It probably stems from the inability of current Hollywood to portray female characters as having any weaknesses at all, that would be heresy. The result is that it's hard to empathize with and care about the main character. They don't have any dimensionality.

Of the ones you listed I watched The Last Jedi and Captain Marvel. I know what I wrote is also true for Mulan thanks to friends who watched it and the Critical Drinker. He has a couple good films on YouTube actually demonstrating this aspect of modern films:

- Mulan: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIH-eFqBLP4>

- Star Wars: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GSj6wEm4zZY>

- Captain Marvel: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKHEjpFF6J0>

>What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome. They're just made awesome from the start. It probably stems from the inability of current Hollywood to portray female characters as having any weaknesses at all, that would be heresy. The result is that it's hard to empathize with and care about the main character. They don't have any dimensionality.

I agree. This seems obvious. So why can't these sophisticated critics see this and rate the movie accordingly? They're obviously using a completely different set of criteria to rate movies, and entertainment is far down the list.

because $$$

The Last Jedi and Rise of Skywalker both have the same main character. But the difference critic/audience ratings are stark. Critics rate The Last Jedi significantly higher than the audience average, while they rate Rise of Skywalker significantly lower.

The difference is not in the main character, the difference is in how the movies relate to the established conventions of the franchise.

> What they do share is that the main character is an underdeveloped Mary Sue, without character flaws, without weaknesses they must overcome.

Regarding Rey in context of The Last Jedi, did we watch the same movie? She was basically a mixture of having doubt and uncertainty and being troubled for the large part of the movie. Only in the confrontation with Kylo, we see her inner strength but even that was tempered with her vulnerability - its not like she vanquished Kylo with a smirk.

She never lost a fight. She's never shown to have any moral flaws. Compare that to Anakin who lost plenty of fights (thereby also losing parts of his body) despite being an overpowered character; he was also arrogant and impatient. What moral flaws does Rey have?

Doubting yourself and then winning at everything doesn't make you relatable. It makes you like that colleague from school who was stressed out before every exam, saying for sure they're gone fail, proceeding to have straight A's from every one of them. When you hear them doubt themselves next time, you don't empathise with them, you say "oh shut up".

When she did the mind trick on accident(?) and without a single lick of instruction, I was done.

> This leads us to today, where critic reviews are functionally useless for the broad audience

This is rather over the top, since the article clearly shows reviews and audience ratings does correlate, especially towards the top.

But it is always interesting with movies where the difference of opinion is starkest.

Note that the "audience ratings" does not always correlate with the average audience. Especially with divisive movies like TLJ or the Ghostbusters reboot, disgruntled fans run campaigns to get the score down. TLJ is still one of the highest grossing movies in history, so the audience rating putting it significantly lower than say John Carter or Snakes on a Plane is clearly not representative of the general movie going audience.

They haven’t sufficiently demonstrated correlation for me. I think the last chart demonstrates it’s a lot more complicated. Just one example… How many obscure art films are there with highly-selective audiences which receive perfect critical scores and perfect audience scores that mostly serve to add bias to the correlation? The movies we’re responding to- which could easily be a list of movies many average joes “care about”- shows negative correlation.

Presumably an average Joe watches average movies, i.e. blockbusters which are the movies which attract the largest audience. The articles shows a relatively high correlation compared to the more niche cheaper movies. But yeah, it would be cool to se correlation score for specific genres.

Maybe I didn’t read closely enough but I believe the article only showed correlation for “all” movies and movies with <20 million budget. It doesn’t show blockbusters or anything like that. It’s worth mentioning, too, what is considered “high correlation” should be quite different from the stock market and should be carefully debated. 0 correlation isn’t just 0 correlation; it would imply these people are aliens with different sensory inputs.

Yeah you are right, it doesn't show correlation specifically for blockbusters. I misinterpreted.

Part of the problems critics face is that with the fall of traditional media and the consolidation of movie studios they have essentially become shills. There aren't powerful enough critics to say "This Disney movie is terrible" and stay a critic for much longer.

Yikes. Call me philistine, but seeing that Last Jedi score peels the scab off the idea that there is any intellectual value remaining in their job.

I’m not sure about the critics of yore, but, as all of your scores evince, I am drawing the impression that modern critics either 1. self-select as part of group of certain demographics or 2. deliberately pander to that group of certain demographics “as the wind heads in that direction”. Not really something an intellectually honest individual would find value in, and if they belong to your tribe, you can probably find more well-written diatribes on Twitter.

Maybe you're aware of how Rotten Tomatoes scores work, but in case someone reading this isn't: the score is not some average of individual scores like IMDb uses (I think), but just the _proportion of critic scores that are positive_.

So, if a film has 100x 2.5/4 star ratings from critics and 50 1.5/4 star ratings, it would have a Tomatometer score of 67% (100 positive of 150 ratings).

Yes, I’m familiar- score is not the most accurate word choice in this case, although I stick by my point.