Like everyone else, I generally do hover around Netflix movie listings on a weekend deciding what to watch and face crippling anxiety to make a decision. The anxiety gets worse if you're in charge of deciding a movie for a group. Eventually my thumbs get a decent workout from jabbing the remote endlessly and my will power to watch something slowly erodes. "Uggh! What to watch??", yells my brain as the cursor inches towards suggesting The Office reruns.
In order to make this process simpler we cross reference each movie with its IMDB or RT (depending on your purist levels, unless you're the Metacritic sort) ratings. What I've usually found is people tend to pick movies above 7.0 on IMDB or 80% on RT. My sample size for this thorough study is 3 of my friends, so before you go waving an academic journal on my face on how wrong that number is...shush!
Why do we do this?
Well, we don't want to waste our *precious* time on some inane shit. Unless inane shit is what your jam is, then you're probably wrapping up the Too Hot To Handle Season 1 right now. But there's a weird pain that has come up in watching boring movies. Movies have go at such a pace, that a loo break would mean you don't know who these three new characters are anymore.
Last night I watched Operation Finale on Netflix, cause I've just been weirdly obsessed with WW2 stuff lately. This made the Netflix recommendation engine go "Psst! Hey! Seems like you're into this whole holocaust scene. Here's more fuel for your nightmares.". Now the movie currently has 60% on RT and 6.6 on IMDB. This usually would've been an auto disqualification, cause I only watch movies which the masses have deemed worthy of my time. * claps twice * GUARDS SEIZE THIS CINEMATIC FILTH! is how I would normally react, but this time I thought... 'Why not?'. (Also, this came after scrolling mindlessly for 45 mins...so yeah...that too).
Weirdly. It was an okay movie, if I may say so. I wasn't blown away or anything, but pleasantly surprised. There might have been some historical inaccuracies and some copy paste stuff seemingly (air-)lifted from Argo, but it was in no way a bad movie. And yet, I was confused by my decision of going against the ratings. Which got me thinking. Are my opinions on movies SO derived by the ratings themselves.
Well in order to understand the fact, I wanted to test this hypothesis. By looking at my favorite movies from my childhood to my late teens. This was at a time when I used to watch a whole gamut of movies where ratings never came in the way. Although I do admit, the decisions were partially motivated by a lack of options. So it was either "There's nothing else on TV to watch. So...fuck it!" or "These are these 6 movies I have on my Hard Drive. So...fuck it!". And surprisingly there were several movies I liked from the past, which had sub 6★ ratings on IMDB. Sub 6★ movies, if I saw one on any list today would be thrown off a moving bus in less than a second.
There are various factors I attribute to this.
The overload of digital content and general impatience triggered by it has led us to take safer bets with watching movies that have a sure shot way of hitting the spot. We start taking lesser risks. We crave more for relatively homogenized engineered content as opposed to independent works.
Yes, the Marvel domination of Hollywood is one of the reasons too. The way the MCU has taken over has made it inevitable for the Fast Food-isation of the movie industry, leading to more remakes and sequels as opposed to original screenplay's. (This is a much greater and wider topic which I might rant about later cause I can probably write a book on it.)
The issue comes when the principle of Preferential Attachment comes to play. The higher rated movies get more viewings and get rated higher and eventually the distribution can get skewed. This might seem like much more of an algorithmic/mathematical problem, since rating systems can be tuned to make people take more risks and watch a wider range of movies. But this is much more of a behavioral thing. Rating systems at the end of the day are subject to the behavior that shapes it.
The thing is: I LOVE WATCHING MOVIES. I don't call myself a cinephile, cause the connotations it brings is this snooty Terrance Malick worshipping dude who looks down on your taste in plebeian cinema. I don't have anything against summer blockbusters. I actually like the MCU for what it has been able to do, which others have miserably failed attempting (*cough* DC *cough*). But I've noticed how it has modified my taste in picking movies. Cause I'm not willing to take the risks that I used to.
The bigger issue here is that movies do ultimately shape a part of the way we think. And we really need to have the ability to think on our own rather than have opinions cut out for us. Opinions that dictate whether we actually like the movie or not.
But the real REAL reason I wrote this was cause I saw Roland Emmerich's 1998 Godzilla has 16% on RT. No disrespect to the OG Kaiju movies, but that Godzilla was fun! FUN! 8/10.
Also please check out MUBI, in case you haven't.