Banana Scoop

Rotten Tomatoes is a website that compiles the reviews of critics for temporary and historical movies.  A simple way of demonstrating whether a movie is good or bad is evident of a movie’s ‘Tomatometer’.  On the outside this Tomatometer determines whether a movie is ‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’, and the website’s frequent visitors can use this as a means of creating an opinion of the film without even watching the movie itself.  Movies with a 60% and above are considered ‘fresh’ and below 60% are considered ‘rotten’.  People sometimes throw this percentage and rating around as if they know how to develop an opinion on a movie.  The small misunderstanding in how the percentage works marks an ignorance of how one should review a movie and in this article, I’ll try to defog the misunderstanding so that you can use Rotten Tomatoes in an effective way to help filter what movies you should watch.

I consider myself a movie critic even though I have no formal education about film itself or the industry about it.  I’m a punk 19-year-old who has too much time on his hands and is supplied with an endless supply of movies.  Through hours, weeks, or days worth of watching movies, I like to think I can determine for myself when a movie is good or not, so when I recommend it to one of my peers, they take my opinion as if it was valued.  I have a process before I watch every movie.  I open up two tabs in Google Chrome and open up two website: IMDB and Rotten Tomatoes.  I use IMDB to find out who directed it and who stars and I use Rotten Tomatoes to determine if the movie is actually worthwhile watching.  Based on these two aspects, I then decide for myself if the movie is worth spending an hour and a half to two hours of my life, and I’ll usually have a word or two to say by the time it’s done.  Is it coincidence that my consensus usually agrees with Rotten Tomatoes?

First, let’s break down how a movie page is organized on Rotten Tomatoes.  There are several big things you should pay attention to.

Tomatometer

Notice my horrifically drawn red circles and squares.  The first top left circle and arguably the most important aspect is the Tomatometer score.  People often misuse this as believing how ‘good’ a movie is.  And there is a common misconception that if you like a movie that does not have a favorable score you may not have good cinematic taste.  Like I said earlier, this is a large misconception.  Please remember that this is a percentage.  Rotten Tomatoes compiles the reviews of top critics and regular critics and divides their reviews into what could be considered ‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’.  The percentage relates how many critics out of all the critics reviews were counted as ‘fresh’.  If 60% of the reviews are considered ‘fresh’, the website considers the entire movie ‘fresh’. and given the stamp of freshness as seen next to the percentage itself.   It is often misconstrued that the higher magnitude of this score guarantees the that the movie is safe to be considered ‘good’.  While there is a strong correlation between the movie actually being good [opinion-based] and the high magnitude of a score, one is not necessarily the cause of another.  The score simply represents that given in a room of 100 people, in this case, 82 people will consider the movie good.  Whether or not you’re part of the 18 people or the 82 people doesn’t mean there is something wrong with you.  If you disagreed with Rise of the Planet of the Apes [see on whether or not I agreed here] you’re not necessarily alone.  The most powerful way to use this tool is to use it as a filter in determining which movies you should watch or not.  It’s common sense that you’ll likely enjoy a movie enjoyed by 75 percent of people than one that is only enjoyed by about 13 percent of people.

Critics Consensus

I also like to believe that numbers aren’t everything, which brings me to the red box adjacent to the Tomatometer score.  This box is the ‘critics consensus’.  This statement is a summation of EVERY review and the general consensus of each critic.  Understand that they can’t take every critic’s statement into account, but they usually do a good job of summing up most of the parts.  I personally believe this is the most important part of determining whether or not a movie is good.  The consensus will usually comment on the acting, directing, script-writing, everything the movie shines in[or in a bad movie, falls flat on].  When the movie is all said and done, I never check the Tomatometer itself, but I check the consensus if I agree with it.  Call it hindsight, but majority of the time, I more than often agree with the ideas of today’s top critics [See some of the instances where I didn’t agree with the consensus here].  But more than often, I like to use the consensus as a way for the critics to tell me what I should pay attention to.

Audience Tomatometer

The underlined score next to the consensus is the audiences’ own ‘Tomatometer’.  Think of this as a general idea on how the common audience generally liked the film.  I personally don’t use this tool frequently, but I can see why some people would.

Director

The next underlined feature is the film’s director.  This is just a tool used for movie buffs who care about who directed what.  More than often, I’ll click the director of a movie I liked to see what else the director has done.  Try doing this more often to widen your scope and develop an idea of who your favorite director is.

Box Office

The circled number next to it is the domestic box office.  I like looking at this feature to see if even though a movie was scored high by critics suffered at the box office or if a particularly low scored movie did extremely well.  There is no other real reason besides this to care about this number, but more than likely, high box offices produce sequels, so that’s another reason you could use this number.

Stars

The final boxed part contains the stars in the movie.  Regularly, IMDB provides a better spread of who stars, but if you just wanted to use Rotten Tomatoes, you can.  If you found a particular star in the movie attractive or are interested in what else they’ve done, you can click this actor.  Otherwise, there isn’t much else you can use this feature for.

I understand a lot of this was common sense.  And the labels didn’t exactly provide any more insight than the definitions of the labels themselves.  This was more of sharing how I use Rotten Tomatoes as a tool and I’m hoping that you follow the same suit.  I encourage you to become critics yourselves and begin developing a passion for an excellent hobby.  But never become drunk with the power of judgement.  In the words of Ratatouille’s Anton Ego:

“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so.”

Comment and argue.