the site has toyed with withholding “tomatometer” scores for certain high-profile releases like Bad Moms’ Christmas or Justice League. This disruption was enough to become a headline of itself. “A Rotten Tomatoes score is now a news story in itself,” observed Simon Brew on Den of Geek, an acknowledgement of the site’s cultural force.
On a purely conceptual level, Rotten Tomatoes is not a game-changing innovation. Instead, it is a logical extrapolation of long-standing critical norms, taken to their logical extreme. What has changed is the way in which these critical norms have been co-opted in a heightened environment in an era of short attention spans and instant gratification.
“All ratings are silly anyway,” reflected Roger Ebert when pressed on his “thumbs up” or “thumbs down” metric by The Archive of American Television.
Many reviewers would agree with this. “Star ratings are a curse,” acknowledges Irish Times critic Donald Clarke. The reasons are quite apparent. Simon Brew of Den of Geek explains, "Scoring a film isn't a mathematical or scientific process."
Ebert himself grappled with this awkward reality, acknowledging that movie grades were relative and subjective; that similar ratings did not mean that the films were comparable in quality. A three-star slasher movie was different from a three-star romance, and there was always
always a question of how best to weigh the strengths and weaknesses of a given film in a fair-minded manner. Ebert had tried to convince his editors at The Chicago-Sun Times to drop star-ratings on reviews circa 1970, but he failed because Gene Siskel had just started using them.
Despite Ebert’s unease with movie ratings as a concept, the critic would be responsible for one of the biggest innovations in movie ratings since The New York Daily News introduced the four-star scale in 1929. When Siskel and Ebert launched At the Movies on PBS in 1986, they found that a lot of their established critical vernacular was tied up in copyright. They had to invent a whole new system of discussing and rating movies for a television audience. They hit upon a very simple idea.
“What's the first thing people ask you?” Siskel contended. “Should I see this movie? They don't want a speech on the director's career. Thumbs up--yes. Thumbs down--no.” It was a very elegant rating system. It was digital. To be fair, the fact that both Siskel and Ebert would grade a movie on that binary scale meant that there were four possible grade combinations, but the simplicity of the rating scheme endured. Siskel even copyrighted the concept of “two thumbs up.”
Of course, in the context of film discourse, At the Movies was more than just a simple binary rating system. It was a forum for film discussion and debate. Ebert’s collections of film criticism are compelling reads, and there is no denying Ebert’s influence on film criticism as an art form unto itself. It would be reductive to claim that his contributions to the form amounted to little more than three words and a pass/fail grading scheme.
CinÉireann / December 2017 19