Amazon's Rings of Power has taught me that reviews are becoming meaningless.
Is there hope that we can bring reviews back from the brink?
It’s 1997, it’s Saturday afternoon and you have just pushed your way through the large, flip-flappy doors of cinema 1 into the dull, dimly lit arcade of the Mermaid Beach Twin Cinema lobby. The tartan colored carpet begins to whirl and blend into a kaleidoscope of obtuse shapes and stark colors as your brain struggles with the process of landing itself back into reality.
You turn your head slightly and notice a thin LED strip affixed to the walls. In the seconds it takes to stumble into the artificial light you notice the word STARSHIP begin to horizontally zip across its face, followed closely by the word TROOPERS, then 2:30PM.
Not even the smell of artificial butter soaking into expensive popcorn can compete with the rush of endorphins coursing through your extremities; holding your fingers up to the light you feel the low hum of electricity jump up and down your bones in sync with the rhythmic pattern of your heartbeat. “I feel like a god” you murmur to yourself, reaching out to the empty air in front of your face as though at any moment your fingers will hook the fabric of the universe into your grasp siphon it into your hands to examine and control.
Your friend, equally mesmerized, turns to you and exclaims, “Holy shit man, that was awesome!”
You can barely form words. All you remember is uttering “Fuck yeah” softly under your breath, followed by something about seeing them at school on Monday. To be honest you’re not quite sure. Everything after the credits began to roll at the end of the movie has become a long lasting mental fog.
Stumbling into the sunlight the outside world seems different somehow. In the 2 hours or so you sat in the movie theatre it has morphed into a cold and foreign place to a young teenager. Looking around frantically you can now see things you never noticed before, you see trash littering the gutters on every street corner and cars honking in frustration at one another with cold indifference. “Whatever happened to civic duty?” you mumble sharply, “How many of these people are fit to serve in the Mobile Infantry?” you ponder.
Without warning a small cockroach scuttles from a large crack in the ageing concrete sidewalk, it’s legs chitter meekly as it reacts to your presence, running quickly to the nearest safe space for fear of being eaten or killed. Your heightened eagle-eyed senses can detect its fear, “It’s afraid!” you scream.
“It’s afraaaaaid!”
There are no onlookers to cheer.
It’s afraid!
You arrive home and flick on your television. The light Saturday afternoon programming begins to warm your inner hearth.
But not all is as it seems. You see the hours you have been gone from the house have numbed you to the evil that has been festering underneath your nose the entire time, completely anesthetized and unable to feel the oncoming storm of emotions and negativity that have begun to swirl between the four walls of your own home. It will be the ultimate betrayal.
Roger Ebert, the undeniable stalwart of cinema reviews is talking about the absolute cinematic masterpiece Starship Toopers.
This is the movie you just watched!
Still glowing and still feeling the rush of electricity surging through your digits you sit and listen closely to what he has to say, safe in the knowledge that the most learned of film critics will see the art that has been weaved lovingly throughout the tapestry of the greatest movie of all time.
“Starship Troopers is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters and values are pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans.”
Wait, what the fuck did he just say?
“You'd think a human race capable of interstellar travel might have developed an effective insecticide, but no.”
You......you fucking Judas.
“It doesn't really matter, since the Bugs aren't important except as props for the interminable action scenes, and as an enemy to justify the film's quasi-fascist militarism.”
You hands tremble as you reach into your pocket. As you throw the remnant shrapnel in your wallet at the screen you shout loudly, “Here is your thirty pieces of silver!”. Loose change bounces off the thick plastic of your CRT television.
“I give it 2 stars”, Ebert responds, talking through you as if you were an apparition, an invisible and completely silent ghostly figure that has been forgotten by time and thought.
This is inconceivable. What is it he is missing? More importantly, what was it that you noticed in the film that Ebert hadn’t? Simplistic? Sure. Oddly fascist? There’s no doubt there, if the movie was a real-life person it would be the one guy at the party that would openly advocate for the homeless to be “Left to their own devices. Let nature sort them out”.
You start to ponder aloud if you were both watching different movies. In truth, perhaps it was the combination of Ebert’s personal film preferences and tight working schedule that affected his ability to look beyond the film’s schlocky and ham-fisted exterior to see Starship Troopers for the ridiculous cocaine-fuelled action movie it meant to be perceived as.
Leaving 1997 behind and slipping back into reality, it paints an interesting picture on the nature of reviews. If the late 90’s television audience took the by-the-book definition of a review to heart and used Ebert’s review as a guide stone to see the movie, or not, then how could anyone have fallen in love with the story of Rico’s Roughnecks?
Reviews are built on the idea that the reviewer is much more knowledgeable than the audience, it’s a core principle that makes up the DNA of every review that has ever been put to print across every discipline imaginable; as Gordon Ramsay spat the contents of his Shepherd’s Pie in disgust across the tablecloth of the Lion’s Head pub in East Wales we all laughed and nodded approvingly, because as the audience we understood that Gordon Ramsay knew more about the construction of a perfect Shepherd’s Pie than some random ageing tea-lady called Susan.
“Well eh mooltiple people torld me they lurve me pie, like” she bleets at us in her thick working class Welsh accent.
We scoff at her even more. I mean, how can she think she knows more than Gordon? He probably owns one of those proper French chef hats that they have in Ratatouille, you know the ones, they look like a loaf of bread on steroids. I mean come on, he has man-titties the size and shape Danish pastries, this is a guy that knows the inside of a fucking pie, Susan, you piece of peasant trash.
Even if the reviewer doesn’t have a Michelin star restaurant tucked safely under their belt, even just having eaten, seen or experienced the thing being reviewed instantly turns them into your senior and you their junior – Roger Ebert may not be the greatest fan of science fiction or even the intended audience for Starship Troopers, but at the end of the day he watched the movie and you didn’t you loser so he is in a better position to make a judgement call.
But is that actually the case?
As I ponder over the history of reviews I often wonder how many people may have been turned away from something that they may come to cherish because a review pointed them in the wrong direction? This of course strikes at the very heart of reviews as a whole – as we plumb the deepest recesses of movies, TV and video games and we all agree that it’s perfectly fine to not use reviews as a canary in the coalmine, then, what value can they really hold?
The most recent Starship Troopers equivalent could be considered Amazon’s interpretation of the Lord of the Rings series of books and films, The Rings of Power. It has undoubtedly been difficult for anyone reading this to have traversed the internet and not found someone ramming their opinions down our throats about wonderful world building, or its direct opposite, terrible world building and dull characters.
Truth be told the series has taught me to not listen to reviewers at all – for 8 episodes I watched an incredibly vivid and engaging story open up in front of me. I wasn’t held back by any preconceived notions about what Tolkien’s world had to be or if Amazon was following myth and lore perfectly to the letter. I was honestly confused when I heard people talking about terrible acting, with constant comparisons made back to Peter Jackson’s original trilogy. I found that to be some incredibly difficult information to parse, especially when Viggo Mortensen’s ham-fisted line, “What do your elf eyes see?” tumbled over and over through my mind.
I became perplexed at the notion that Jackson’s trilogy was somehow being held aloft above our heads like a baby lion over a cliff edge as the prime example for Oscar worthy performances. To me, LOTR was much like Starship Toopers, a series that the Eberts and Ramseys of the world didn’t much care for, but fans like you and me absolutely-fucking-adored.
Want to know what Ebert gave Fellowship of the Ring? Three stars. Of Return of the King he wrote, “The story is just a little too silly to carry the emotional weight of a masterpiece.”
But of course if your feelings for The Rings of Power are not as rosy-cheeked as mine I can do nothing except pat you on the back and support your personal experience the same way we should support every personal experience – movies, television, food and books are some of the most important defining characteristics of our own personal image. The things we love and the things we hate are manifestations of our sub-conscious, they are the id that turns us into living, walking people that can prance into a room and speak with confidence to anyone willing to listen to our inane nonsense.
The automatic senior/junior relationship I mentioned earlier can make reviews a frustrating minefield of emotion. As a massive fan of The Angry Joe Show it pained me to have to wade through a weekly unloading of, what I can only describe as sheer hatred, for a television show that I’ve come to admire. It hasn’t changed my opinion of the channel and I still enjoy it as much as ever, but it lead to some frustrating reactions when attempting to counter the opinion.
“Don’t watch the review then, simple”.
However it really is not that simple though - if I can simply choose to ignore an opinion because it doesn’t match my experience of something I’ve watched, how many times have I ignored something I haven’t yet watched and may have potentially enjoyed? If the value of a review only comes in retrospect, then the whole fucking concept falls apart.
Have reviews become beacons for the audience to rally around?
To be honest at the end of 2,000 words I had hoped to come to a conclusion about the validity of reviews and their future within the ecosystem of the next generation of media, but it feels as though as an audience we are left with the unshakable reality that reviews, like movies themselves, are completely unique experiences.
The irony of operating a review website is certainly not lost on me. As such I can only drive home to the readers of this article the core ideology behind why The Tokyo 5 publishes reviews of its own – I mean it’s not rocket science, it’s content.
Acres and acres of videos and articles are created each day for the sole purpose of cramming ad space in between random thoughts about terrible Shakespearean acting and whether elves can be black. For the reader these reviews then became lighthouses in the fog of the internet, spaces to flock to where people can justify their opinions that “there are more people like me than there are like you” so therefore Tolkien is 100% literally rolling over in his grave at the thought of woke Harfoots.
Naturally the opposite can also be said of positive reviews, they become spotlights that focus on the idea that people are using their negative opinions as code for deeper, more destructive forms of social engineering.
In the modern age we just have to accept that reviews are no longer operating how they are meant to; the gentle guiding hand that instructs like-minded folks about the pros and cons of things they are interested in has instead been replaced by the mechanical hive mind of content creation and war between two opposing ideologies looking to score points on the world’s most frustrating battlefield.
Is there hope for the future of reviews? Perhaps.
In the end we have to acknowledge the fact that the people smacking us over the head with their opinion are not necessarily better suited to explaining my own niche and personal taste to me, you see they’re not really our seniors and our opinion isn’t any less valuable than theirs. Sure, my mother doesn’t have as many accreditations as Gordon Ramsey, but every now and then she can sure knock out a pretty tasty Shepherd’s Pie, and if I had to wait until Gordon told me he had found the perfect pie for me to have ever eaten one than I might not ever have given my mum’s pie a second glance.
So in the end I just have to “give it a go” and see where the experience takes me.
One episode of The Rings of Power at a time.
~ Andrew Archer