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Movie negativity

By Bert Ehrmann

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Fort Wayne Reader

2018-05-31

I’ve been scratching my head lately to figure out why there’s so much negativity being directed at films these days by moviegoers? If you read the online vitriol about movies like Star Wars: The Last Jedi, I think you’d come away thinking that it was an abomination.

But I saw Star Wars: The Last Jedi and liked it a lot and couldn’t understand where all the negativity was coming from? We all saw the same movie yet there was a vocal group of people out there who hated it and even started petitions to try and get it altered to better suit how they thought the movie should be.

And this isn’t just about Star Wars, though people have hated those movies since George Lucas did Episode I through III. They also hate movies like Suicide Squad, The Hobbit and Justice League. While I don’t necessarily think those movies are great ones, I don’t think they’re bad ones either.

Here’s what I think the problem is — people don’t watch enough films these days.

When I was growing up me and my brother would watch all sorts of movies. We had cable, one premium movie channel and would rent movies on VHS a few times a month. But for the most part we couldn’t really control what we watched. For sure we could always change the channel or watch something on tape, but for the most part if there was really nothing on TV of interest we’d end up watching whatever movie happened to be on TV when we were watching it. Which meant we were exposed to lots and lots of things we wouldn’t have seen on our own.
I think of all the horror movies I happened to watch from The Last Man on Earth, Day of the Dead and The Hidden that I only saw because they happened to be on TV when I was watching. The same goes for just about every genre of movie out there.

To this day I’ll turn over to some random movie airing on some random channel that I know I’ve never seen before — only to realize about half way through that I actually had watched it as a kid and had seen it enough that I can remember specific quotes from it.

Which means over time my brother and I were exposed to a few great movies, a lot of good ones and a few stinkers.

I don’t think many audiences experience movies like this anymore. They won’t sit through good movies when it’s easy to watch a great one on demand. And they’re certainly not going to intentionally watch a bad movie, unless it’s ironically being made fun of. All of the things me and my brother sat through as boredom killers as kids aren’t experienced whatsoever today.

I can see the argument being made that’s a good thing. Why should, say, a restaurant goer eat anything but filet mignon and lobster if they don’t have to? What I’d say to that is that if all you consume are what everyone already considers the “best” then you’re going to miss all the other things out there. With food it’d be missing things like food trucks, hole-in-the-wall restaurants and diners. And with movies it means missing a lot of good content when all you want is what’s great.

I also think that if all people watch are what’s already considered “great” movies then they’re going to have a skewed view at what films should be. Of course if you measure something like Star Wars: The Last Jedi up to the original trilogy and nothing else you’re going to come away disappointed since what film could ever measure up to three of the greatest movies of all-time? But what if you measure Star Wars: The Last Jedi to the dozens of bad sci-fi movies that have come out in the last decade? I think that changes the rating for any movie.

I don’t think movies are a zero-sum game. I don’t think a movie is either the best movie ever made or sheer crap, sometimes movies are “good” and that’s okay. And it think the reason I’m like this is because of the hundreds and hundreds of movies I saw growing up.