What Makes Movies "Good" or "Bad"?

                Movies, TV shows, books, video games, music, and pretty much all forms of entertainment have tons of internal variation, and are also subject to close critical scrutiny. We all have our personal criteria for what makes a movie good or bad, and a lot of times, these criteria are vastly different. For example, there were a lot of people who liked the 2012 adaptation of The Hobbit, but there were also a lot of people who hated it. What’s interesting is, a lot of people liked and hated it for a huge amount of different reasons. Some people said that it was way too far from the book, others thought it was overly long, and still others simply did not like the book in the first place.  Now, we have all been told “everybody’s different” or some variant of that, so me saying that everyone has different taste probably sounds pretty obvious to you. However, in my opinion, it is actually shocking how similar our tastes really are. Let me elaborate.

While some people might have liked Batman v. Superman more than Moonlight, we all have a voice in the back of our mind that tells us that Moonlight is still “better.” Sure, maybe you would rather spend an hour and a half watching zombies get their heads smashed in with baseball bats than watch a movie that provides an in-depth and haunting view of a character, but you still “know which one’s actually better.” So, while we often have different tastes, there is a set of acknowledged and implied standards that a movie must meet in order to be considered “good.” The LEGO Batman movie got a higher audience score on Rotten Tomatoes than Fences, but most people would say that Fences is a much better movie. Some of us just have more sophisticated tastes.

                Why is that? After all, we are all different, and if we like something more than something else, why would we still think of it as inferior, and our tastes as simple, or unintelligent. This makes very little sense to me. I could understand people labeling views that disagreed with theirs as unintelligent and mindless, but it seems weird for people to criticize their own views like that.

                In my opinion, this is partially due to critic culture. Film critics definitely prefer a certain kind of movie, and since they are the ones getting paid to decide what’s good and what isn’t, the rest of us assume, and have assumed for a long time, that they are right. We have all figured out what kind of things critics like to see in movies. Therefore, we all have an inner film critic, a sort of conscience-like entity that tells us which films are good and which are bad. In fact, I think that the phenomenon of the “inner critic” is very similar to the phenomenon of conscience, if much more trivial. Conscience is developed by taking what the trusted adults around us (people who we acknowledge have more knowledge and wisdom than us) say and do and internalizing it. After a while, we develop their voice in our heads, and can apply their set of guidelines to any situation we encounter. In this case, the trusted adults are the film critics, and their voice in our head tells us what movies are “good,” and what are “bad.” In this way, we are able to judge movies as if we are film critics. Quality in writing, directing, and special effects are kind of like a more trivial version of morals. There is no universal law that says they exist, however, we all agree and have always agreed that they do. Obviously, this is not true for absolutely everyone. There are always a few “film sociopaths” in every crowd, just like there are a few regular sociopaths in every crowd. However, it would explain a lot about why we all have some inner notion of good and bad movies, even if we don’t always agree with it. It has become so pervasive that at this point that even if there were no film critics, we would maintain the same tastes, simply because everyone around us would as well.

                I think that one way you can see this is by going to a play. Movie special effects are something that today’s audiences expect to reach a certain level of realism. If the effects fall below this par, they are deemed cheesy or bad. In attempts to capture the attention of viewers and set themselves ahead of the crowd, film companies have been rapidly increasing the level of realism that their special effects achieve. However, each time they make a leap forward, other companies do the same, and suddenly what used to be revolutionary is now just average. The special effects standards we hold movies to have been creeping higher and higher for as long as movies have been around. However, for whatever reason, this has not happened in plays. If a movie came out with the effects of a play, critics and regular viewers alike would rip it apart. However, this does not happen with plays. You don’t see someone coming out of a play saying “Ugh! That was so corny! The special effects were terrible!” Why is this? It’s because our “play conscience” tells us that special effects don’t matter, so we don’t care about them in plays. However, our “film conscience” tells us that special effect do matter, so, as a result, we care about them in movies.

                Anyway, this was a long ramble. The takeaway is: movies are not objectively good or bad (though we can all agree that there are a few exceptions to this), and what we think about movies is based on what we are surrounded with. I’m not saying that critics are wrong, necessarily. I tend to agree with them that Moonlight was better than Batman v. Superman. All I’m saying is that from now on, don’t feel like you have to like one thing, even if you don’t, just because you are told by your film conscience that you have to.