Arkady
President
Did anyone see the new Star Wars film? The critics nearly all liked it, but I don't think it deserved such praise. Spoilers ahead.
It wasn't a terrible film. The cinematography and sound design were good, and there were probably a higher share of good performances than in a typical Star Wars film. And with the plot wreckage JJ Abrams left with the last film, I guess it was an accomplishment to pull anything coherent together. But the writing was weak -- the two central plot lines were rehashed. One was basically the first season of the Battlestar Galactica reboot (the rebels racing across space, trying to stay in front of a pursuing New Order, which has just destroyed the Republic). The other was rehashed Return of the Jedi (the good jedi having an emotional connection to the bad one, going to him, and getting him to turn on his boss). There's also a third plot-line that is a complete waste of screen time, since nothing that happens in it ends up mattering even a little to the plot. Worse, the characterizations were childish and unconvincing -- especially relative to past behavior by the characters. The characters never felt authentically human --driven by internally coherent motivations. Instead, they were props to be moved about as needed to push the (clunky) themes.
It seems the audience agrees. Although critics have given it a 91% rating on "Rotten Tomatoes," the audience has it at just 50%. That's extremely low by Hollywood blockbuster standards, since audiences are a self-selecting group that is predisposed to be fans of the film. This is the flip side of another sci-fi offering: "The Orville" -- Seth McFarlane's alternately funny and straight take on Star Trek. Critics loathe it. It has just 20% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics. And some critics have singled it out for merciless attacks. NPR's "Best of TV 2017" singled out "The Orville" as the only show it talked about in its "worst show of 2017." It was referred to as brain-melting and unfunny. Yet the audience loved it -- it's at 93% for audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the most beloved shows on television. Youtube is packed with semi-professional reviewers rapturously praising the show and listing it among their all-time favorites.
I titled this "channeling my inner conservative," because I suspect politics are playing into the huge gap between critical and public reception of both the Last Jedi and the Orville. I've read a bunch of reviews of each, and the critics fixate on political matters that have little to do with the in-universe world of what they're reviewing. They've praised the Last Jedi for its diversity -- the main good-guys include three white women, an Asian woman, a black man, an Hispanic man, and only one non-Hispanic white guy -- the holdover, Luke Skywalker, who is presented as a problematic character, and ultimately killed off. Many reviewers could hardly get beyond this meta-analysis to address the actual film. They were happy because it was about an inclusive, female-led, multi-ethnic resistance against an evil white male New Order..... a message they hoped would have value in the current political climate. And so I think they were looking right past the film's huge flaws.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a liberal and I'm happy to see growing diversity in film. I quite liked Rogue One which was very similar in terms of gender/ethnicity/politics meta-messaging. But at the end of the day, a work of art either holds together on its own, or it doesn't. If it does, it can carry that political baggage ably, and maybe do some good in the process. If it doesn't, though, all the good intentions in the world won't give it life.
Meanwhile, the Orville seems to be hated largely because critics hate Seth McFarlane. They hate him because he has a long history of being vulgarly politically incorrect (even if almost none of that makes its way onscreen, for the Orville). McFarlane's Family Guy and Ted traffic in misogyny and line-crossing ethnic and religious humor. When he hosted the Oscars, he subjected those critics to more such material, including a song-and-dance number about all the actresses he'd seen naked. And his show "Family Guy" is particularly rough in its treatment of its liberal character -- Brian, the dog, who is almost unfailing portrayed as a sanctimonious hypocrite, who only professes liberal beliefs as a kind of virtue-signalling (usually to get woman), but actually doesn't give a crap about any of it. It's easy to dislike McFarlane if, like most critics, you're culturally liberal, especially if you have an identity-politics focus. Critics wanted to hate the Orville, since it's McFarlane's vanity project, so they saw past what was on screen in order to attack it.
The criticism of the Orville as dumb is particularly telling. Whatever you think of the Orville, it's actually one of the most shamelessly brainy shows on television. It takes its cues from golden age science fiction short stories -- with episodes where the main plot could have been written by Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Ray Bradbury. Sure, it'll let some of the air of out of its own pretensions by undercutting its smart moments with willfully dumb jokes. But it's genuinely thoughtful.
For example, in one episode, the crew finds a giant ship that has been adrift among the stars for so long that the inhabitants have regressed to a fairly primitive state, and don't even realize they're in a ship (the interior is huge and designed to mimic the outdoors.) Eventually the Orville's crew open the dome of the artificial sky, letting the ship's residents see the stars for the first time in their lives, to the utter astonishment of the ship's residents. One crew member recites a line from Emerson "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!" They undercut that with a gag about the captain clearly having no idea who Emerson is, but the sentiment is taken very seriously -- "If the stars should appear" is the title of the episode and its central theme. The whole episode is written to illustrate Emerson's argument -- that if we could step away from the familiarity we have for the wonders of the universe, we'd realize how breathtaking it really is. The episode is one of the most unapologetically egg-headed exercises I've ever seen in a popular TV show. Yet critics say it's brain-melting.
I suspect what we're seeing with movie and TV criticism is largely because of the way art criticism is taught in universities these days. Critics-in-training are essentially given only one lens through which to view art -- a lens that focuses on the meta aspects of the art. They're trained to go immediately to the identity critique of the work. Just as Soviet art critics were taught to view everything from the perspective of class struggle, coming up with Marxist critiques of everything, no matter how ill-fitting, today's critics were taught to view everything from the perspective of critical race theory, women's studies, or LGBTQ viewpoints, and ultimately that's all they see. There's nothing wrong with such perspectives. In fact, they're a very important corrective to long-standing blind spots. But when they are all a critic has, he's going to end up missing much of what's really going on.
That's why some of my favorite critics today are amateurs -- people on Youtube with their own very specific perspectives, which break away from the predictable race/gender viewpoint. Often they're critics of craftsmanship -- focusing on technique.... for example, what is it that gives David Fincher's movies their visual look, or how does Aaron Sorkin communicate character through dialogue, or what's up with the washed-out color palette of Marvel movies. It's not that those perspectives are more important than the ones we get from the mainstream critics. I admit they're less important. But they at least bring new angles to understand the work, rather than pounding mechanically at the corpse of the same tired nags all the other critics have already reduced to a pulp.
It wasn't a terrible film. The cinematography and sound design were good, and there were probably a higher share of good performances than in a typical Star Wars film. And with the plot wreckage JJ Abrams left with the last film, I guess it was an accomplishment to pull anything coherent together. But the writing was weak -- the two central plot lines were rehashed. One was basically the first season of the Battlestar Galactica reboot (the rebels racing across space, trying to stay in front of a pursuing New Order, which has just destroyed the Republic). The other was rehashed Return of the Jedi (the good jedi having an emotional connection to the bad one, going to him, and getting him to turn on his boss). There's also a third plot-line that is a complete waste of screen time, since nothing that happens in it ends up mattering even a little to the plot. Worse, the characterizations were childish and unconvincing -- especially relative to past behavior by the characters. The characters never felt authentically human --driven by internally coherent motivations. Instead, they were props to be moved about as needed to push the (clunky) themes.
It seems the audience agrees. Although critics have given it a 91% rating on "Rotten Tomatoes," the audience has it at just 50%. That's extremely low by Hollywood blockbuster standards, since audiences are a self-selecting group that is predisposed to be fans of the film. This is the flip side of another sci-fi offering: "The Orville" -- Seth McFarlane's alternately funny and straight take on Star Trek. Critics loathe it. It has just 20% on Rotten Tomatoes from critics. And some critics have singled it out for merciless attacks. NPR's "Best of TV 2017" singled out "The Orville" as the only show it talked about in its "worst show of 2017." It was referred to as brain-melting and unfunny. Yet the audience loved it -- it's at 93% for audience score on Rotten Tomatoes, making it one of the most beloved shows on television. Youtube is packed with semi-professional reviewers rapturously praising the show and listing it among their all-time favorites.
I titled this "channeling my inner conservative," because I suspect politics are playing into the huge gap between critical and public reception of both the Last Jedi and the Orville. I've read a bunch of reviews of each, and the critics fixate on political matters that have little to do with the in-universe world of what they're reviewing. They've praised the Last Jedi for its diversity -- the main good-guys include three white women, an Asian woman, a black man, an Hispanic man, and only one non-Hispanic white guy -- the holdover, Luke Skywalker, who is presented as a problematic character, and ultimately killed off. Many reviewers could hardly get beyond this meta-analysis to address the actual film. They were happy because it was about an inclusive, female-led, multi-ethnic resistance against an evil white male New Order..... a message they hoped would have value in the current political climate. And so I think they were looking right past the film's huge flaws.
Don't get me wrong. I'm a liberal and I'm happy to see growing diversity in film. I quite liked Rogue One which was very similar in terms of gender/ethnicity/politics meta-messaging. But at the end of the day, a work of art either holds together on its own, or it doesn't. If it does, it can carry that political baggage ably, and maybe do some good in the process. If it doesn't, though, all the good intentions in the world won't give it life.
Meanwhile, the Orville seems to be hated largely because critics hate Seth McFarlane. They hate him because he has a long history of being vulgarly politically incorrect (even if almost none of that makes its way onscreen, for the Orville). McFarlane's Family Guy and Ted traffic in misogyny and line-crossing ethnic and religious humor. When he hosted the Oscars, he subjected those critics to more such material, including a song-and-dance number about all the actresses he'd seen naked. And his show "Family Guy" is particularly rough in its treatment of its liberal character -- Brian, the dog, who is almost unfailing portrayed as a sanctimonious hypocrite, who only professes liberal beliefs as a kind of virtue-signalling (usually to get woman), but actually doesn't give a crap about any of it. It's easy to dislike McFarlane if, like most critics, you're culturally liberal, especially if you have an identity-politics focus. Critics wanted to hate the Orville, since it's McFarlane's vanity project, so they saw past what was on screen in order to attack it.
The criticism of the Orville as dumb is particularly telling. Whatever you think of the Orville, it's actually one of the most shamelessly brainy shows on television. It takes its cues from golden age science fiction short stories -- with episodes where the main plot could have been written by Arthur Clarke, Isaac Asimov, or Ray Bradbury. Sure, it'll let some of the air of out of its own pretensions by undercutting its smart moments with willfully dumb jokes. But it's genuinely thoughtful.
For example, in one episode, the crew finds a giant ship that has been adrift among the stars for so long that the inhabitants have regressed to a fairly primitive state, and don't even realize they're in a ship (the interior is huge and designed to mimic the outdoors.) Eventually the Orville's crew open the dome of the artificial sky, letting the ship's residents see the stars for the first time in their lives, to the utter astonishment of the ship's residents. One crew member recites a line from Emerson "If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!" They undercut that with a gag about the captain clearly having no idea who Emerson is, but the sentiment is taken very seriously -- "If the stars should appear" is the title of the episode and its central theme. The whole episode is written to illustrate Emerson's argument -- that if we could step away from the familiarity we have for the wonders of the universe, we'd realize how breathtaking it really is. The episode is one of the most unapologetically egg-headed exercises I've ever seen in a popular TV show. Yet critics say it's brain-melting.
I suspect what we're seeing with movie and TV criticism is largely because of the way art criticism is taught in universities these days. Critics-in-training are essentially given only one lens through which to view art -- a lens that focuses on the meta aspects of the art. They're trained to go immediately to the identity critique of the work. Just as Soviet art critics were taught to view everything from the perspective of class struggle, coming up with Marxist critiques of everything, no matter how ill-fitting, today's critics were taught to view everything from the perspective of critical race theory, women's studies, or LGBTQ viewpoints, and ultimately that's all they see. There's nothing wrong with such perspectives. In fact, they're a very important corrective to long-standing blind spots. But when they are all a critic has, he's going to end up missing much of what's really going on.
That's why some of my favorite critics today are amateurs -- people on Youtube with their own very specific perspectives, which break away from the predictable race/gender viewpoint. Often they're critics of craftsmanship -- focusing on technique.... for example, what is it that gives David Fincher's movies their visual look, or how does Aaron Sorkin communicate character through dialogue, or what's up with the washed-out color palette of Marvel movies. It's not that those perspectives are more important than the ones we get from the mainstream critics. I admit they're less important. But they at least bring new angles to understand the work, rather than pounding mechanically at the corpse of the same tired nags all the other critics have already reduced to a pulp.
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