Why Audiences Don’t Care if a Movie’s Good or Bad (and Why That’s Great)

by Gabriel Valdez

For a long time, the purpose of a movie critic was to tell you if a movie was good or bad, and to let audiences know if they should spend their time and money on it.

Yet marketing has surpassed the critic and figured out how to gets butts in the seats on opening weekend, while sites like Metacritic and IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes (when it’s not spamming viruses) can tell you in a number what a critic says in hundreds of words.

So what the hell are we here for anymore? We can’t simply be an industry of vestigial navel-gazers, can we?

Here’s my thought – audiences do not care if a movie is good or bad anymore. I’m not sure if they ever did, but especially now, they’re more concerned with having certain types of experiences. We don’t just buy a ticket for a story, we buy a ticket for an emotional reaction. For decades, critics have reviewed the story and its technical delivery. As an industry, we’re still not very good at reviewing the emotional experience.

After all, you can’t just say an emotional experience is good or bad. It will be good or bad in different ways for different viewers – that’s how emotion works. You have to do your best to translate what that experience is like, to be a conduit for what sitting in the theater and looking up at that screen for two hours feels like. Different readers have to feel good and bad in different ways about your review. That means you have to be an open book, and that’s hard.

When I worked as a critic 2006-2009, my biggest concern was whether a film was good or not. Since I came back to doing this just last year, I threw that out the window. Quality of a film is still a core component in my reviews, obviously, but I’ll often get the “it’s good” or “it’s bad” and why out of the way pretty quickly. Why spend extra words on what Metacritic could tell you?

What Metacritic can’t tell you is what the experience of watching that movie is like. That’s the half of our job that movie critics have brushed into the corner for the greater part of our existence.

Let me give you an example: one of the most impactful scenes of the year involves the police shooting a black man wearing a hoodie because he seems threatening…in The Amazing Spider-Man 2. Spider-Man (Andrew Garfield) successfully calms the confused Electro (Jamie Foxx) down. Then those Times Square mega-screens kick on like CNN fumbling all over an ongoing tragedy. They redefine a successfully defused situation into a media popularity contest, which leads to a shootout.

Mainstream criticism focused on how messy the narrative was, and reviewing the film essentially became a pile-on of who could insult it the best. That’s fine, insult away. I have just one question – How is that useful to an audience?

To me, it’s criticism’s equivalent of reality television.

I can tell you The Amazing Spider-Man 2 is messy in one sentence: “It’s messy.” In my own review, I spent a few more sentences than that because different viewers will tolerate different kinds of narrative messiness, and it’s important for them to understand what they’re walking into.

I did not spend a thousand words saying this, however. Fine, it’s messy. What else is the movie trying to do? That’s more important to me because those are the things communicating to audiences week after week, and honestly, that has as much to do with an audience’s experience as simple good or bad does.

Criticism is falling woefully behind the curve by not translating the emotional experience of watching movies, especially at a time when mainstream filmmaking is trading in technical perfection for more aggressive social commentary. Critics are only focused on good or bad, or worse yet, lifestyle reporting, as in how a film effects our interpretation of an actor’s celebrity. Many critics treated Fury as a film about redeeming Shia LaBeouf’s career instead of the inherent ugliness of patriarchy. What good does that do our readers?

Only focusing on good or bad misses half the film. Film review as lifestyle reporting misses the whole film. Each makes you blind to the big sea change in modern filmmaking that’s happening all around us. Many critics like to think that our job is using superior knowledge and superior analytical skills to tell others what to think. That’s ridiculous and insulting, and that mentality automatically means audiences are utilizing something those critics don’t have – superior emotional maturity.

When we decide if a movie’s good or bad, we come from a place of judgment. When we understand something despite that judgment, and look at the world from that movie’s perspective, we empathize. The challenge of modern criticism is to figure out how to judge a film and empathize with it all at once.

Otherwise, we’re just a wordier version of Metacritic teaching readers to be cynical about film. That sells criticism short at a time when it has the opportunity to communicate so much more.

Earning its Name — “The Amazing Spider-Man 2”

There’s an early scene in “The Amazing Spider-Man 2” in which Electro, still discovering his electrical superpowers, accidentally causes a disaster in Times Square. Web slinging superhero Spider-Man tries to defuse the situation by talking to Electro, who explains that he doesn’t understand what’s happening to himself, that he needs help. Both of these dynamic super-powers are on the same side.

The nervous Electro suddenly twitches at a surge of energy, and a police sniper takes the shot. It’s a cavalcade of misunderstandings that – at a moment’s notice – turn a good person into a villain. Electro reacts to protect himself, and Spider-Man has to save bystanders who are in the way. Suddenly those Times Square billboards that were zooming in on Electro’s face are zooming in on Spider-Man’s. Electro sees them. Where there wasn’t a fight before, where Spider-Man and Electro were on the same page in a tense situation, suddenly they’re presented in the media capital of the world as opponents. A serious event where lives are at stake has suddenly become a carnival, a conflict imagined from thin air. It’s no mistake that the African-American actor who plays Electro, Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, is dressed in a hoodie for this scene.

Spider-Man still tries to talk with Electro, to calm the situation down before more people get hurt, but when you tell two people they’re in a fight for their lives, the one with less power is likely to believe you. Very few movies can so elegantly teach how national news media gets us to tune in, click links, and get angry about imagined conflicts – between race, religion, and even entire countries. Enough public pressure, and sometimes those imagined conflicts even become real.

It’s a powerful statement in a surprisingly sophisticated superhero movie, and it works because the film is always finding new ways to capture your attention. Spidey’s crime-fighting antics and soaring journeys through the New York City skyline are realized as beautifully as they’ve ever been. The fights are pumped up to cartoonish levels of color and acrobatics, yet they’re always anchored by a sense of what’s at stake.

While “Amazing Spider-Man” can deliver stupendous action and smart social metaphors, it doesn’t seem interested in a complex overall story – evil characters become evil because you know they’re going to, not because they’ve taken every step on the path to get there. While the movie’s capable of delivering captivating and emotional individual scenes, you could take those scenes and rearrange them and it wouldn’t make much difference to the plot. This would be far more glaring a flaw if it weren’t for the movie’s beating heart – the complicated relationship between Spider-Man and Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone.)

That relationship works because actor Andrew Garfield’s superhero is so different from Tobey Maguire’s reserved, socially awkward Spider-Man of a decade ago. Garfield’s Spidey is a class clown. He’s more emotionally raw, and his quick wit is only abrasive until you realize what a defense mechanism it is. Gwen is much more central to the plot than most superhero girlfriends get to be. In a twist on conventional superhero roles, it’s Spider-Man who’s faced with uprooting his life and following Gwen as she pursues her career. It’s nice to see a superhero plot that acknowledges this modern reality.

In the end, this entry is a structural mess, disjointed and uneven. It’s also a stylistic success, brimming with color and ideas and barreling ahead with tremendous energy. There’s one more lesson here, most consistently voiced by Spider-Man’s Aunt May, who raised him. She’s played by Sally Field, who can make any character feel so real you think you’ll see them leaving the theater afterward. The message is that, in difficult times, it’s not enough to just keep up hope. We need to exemplify that hope through action, by helping the smallest and weakest among us, by giving them hope. Spider-Man, Electro, and Green Goblin are all disowned, bullied, and betrayed both by loved ones and the world around them. The difference is that one of them has an Aunt May. She’s the real hero of the piece, although “The Amazing Aunt May” probably wouldn’t draw so many crowds. We all get a chance to play that role for someone, though, to help create a hero for tomorrow instead of a villain, so we can have a world that talks before shots are fired, and that doesn’t make a carnival out of conflict.

“The Amazing Spider-Man 2” is rated PG-13 for sci-fi action.