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.

How We Mold Men — “Fury”

by Gabriel Valdez

There is a review for Fury in my head that I will never write. I’ll try to tell you why:

Fury follows a tank crew pushing into Nazi Germany late in World War 2, but this is merely what happens. It’s not what Fury is about. I could call Fury the best war movie since Clint Eastwood made his Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima double feature. I wouldn’t be wrong, but it doesn’t hit the nail on the head. Instead, I’ll call Fury one of the best movies about indoctrination since A Clockwork Orange.

You see, Brad Pitt’s Sgt. Collier, the tank commander who leads four young men into battle, cannot be called a “good guy.” If beating his subordinates or forcing them to shoot unarmed prisoners helps them to survive, then that is what he’ll do. If allowing his crew to blow off steam by assaulting the local women helps them to survive, then that is what he’ll allow.

When Collier’s tank gets a new assistant driver, a fresh-faced clerk named Norman (Logan Lerman) with zero combat experience, Collier will beat him, emotionally abuse him, and force him to murder and rape. The strange thing is – the utterly difficult thing about this movie – is that writer-director David Ayer forces you to understand Collier. His only goal is to keep his crew alive. His every decision contributes to this. Everything outside that tank – enemy, civilian – is only there to keep his crew breathing that much longer.

There are beautiful, fleeting moments when Pitt lets you see the toll this takes on Collier’s conscience. This is a man who’s made a judgment that his crew’s survival is worth every other moral transgression. Later in the movie, it’s revealed he knows the Bible verse-for-verse, yet he’s kept this hidden. Why? Because he’s rejected its applicability. Living morally in war, he believes, will get the men around him killed, and they are his responsibility. His duty is to mold men and make them hate – him, themselves, the enemy, it doesn’t matter so long as that hate takes away any hesitation before pulling a trigger.

One of the most nerve wracking scenes involves Collier playing house during a lull in combat. He uses Norman and two German women hiding in an apartment to create a pale reflection of a normal family supper. It’s Collier’s momentary reprieve from war, and yet it’s terrifying for these two women.

Are the things Collier does wrong? Of course they are. But to make men kill each other for years on end and then be shocked that they’ve committed sins is perverse: judging them for it is perverse, not judging them for it is perverse.

Fury is rousing, its tank battles brilliantly intense. Collier is among Pitt’s best characters. Lerman, Michael Pena, and Jon Bernthal deliver nuanced, touching performances as the tank crew, and of all actors, Shia LaBeouf is going to make you cry.

Fury is not interested in being an easy movie, nor a palatable one. It is difficult. There are no good guys by its end, just men who judged for themselves what sacrifices they were willing to make of others, and in their own souls, in order to keep the men beside them alive.

And though many young men aren’t faced with platoons of enemy soldiers, we are often brought up to act as if we will be, to believe the shortest route to strength is in hating some perceived weakness in ourselves or in others. We’re often taught to be manly is to bury sentimentality and sensitivity and mercy in order to make our way in the world.

There is a review for Fury in my head that I will never write, because in some way, every young man grows up with the expectation that we will be willing to trade those pieces of our soul in order to survive, that emotion makes us weak and exerting our willpower on another makes us strong, that our flaws can be cured with our worst behavior. We’ve each been taught our own small portion of perversion. In its own way, Fury lays that bare.

Does it Pass the Bechdel Test?

This section helps us discuss one aspect of movies that we’d like to see improved – the representation of women. Read why we’re including this section here.

1. Does Fury have more than one woman in it?

Yes. The two women in the apartment with whom Collier tries to play house.

2. Do they talk to each other?

Briefly.

3. About something other than a man?

Possibly. Some of their German is subtitled. Some isn’t.

Truth be told, I’d have to watch again to see if they talk only about the soldiers, or if they discuss something else. Most of their interaction is silent because they are so terrified – there’s not much dialogue at all and whether they pass or don’t pass the third rule is essentially immaterial. Their conversation takes place under the fear of being raped, so even if they are talking about dinner, they’re not really talking about dinner.

Can it be forgiven? No, nothing in Fury can be forgiven, and that’s the point. Plot-wise, it’s a movie about a World War 2 tank crew, which were only composed of men. Thematically, it’s a movie about men molding other men by threatening them with violence, making them commit violence, and using peer approval and women as the prizes for doing right (i.e. killing without hesitation).

World War 2 is often considered one of the last righteous American wars. This doesn’t mean it was any easier for those involved. What Fury does best is make us still feel for the men who do these awful things – not just to the enemy, but to each other and to innocent bystanders. We begin to understand why, not to give it a pass, but to comprehend just how mad and hellish struggling for one’s life day after day can become.

To watch characters who commit atrocities and still feel for them, to cry over their internal struggles and shake as their fates are decided…it’s a rare experience in any form of storytelling. The point isn’t that these things are forgivable. It’s that they aren’t, and yet we force soldiers into situations where they will increasingly choose the unforgivable just to stay sane.

By extension, what does it say that we use these same tactics to train and reward men for being “manly” in times of peace, or at home during wartime? To be manly, must we always be in a constant state of war with someone, must we always be finding something new to hate in order to draw strength, must we always beat down the sensitive among us until their own window to hate is opened, so they can become manly like us?

The most important way you can understand Fury is to not forgive it. Ayer and Pitt and those involved have created these characters and moments to be unlikeable for a reason. It’s no mistake that the last person in the world you’d ever expect to show mercy is the one that does. It’s the only time two characters connect in the film, understand each other with all the B.S. removed, see in each other what they’ve lost along the way.

Can Fury be forgiven? I’ll be troubled if it is. It’s the rare piece of art that wants you to talk about why it can’t be.