If you've ever been to Rotten Tomatoes to check out the latest rating on a film, you've likely gotten into the habit of ignoring the tomato and paying more attention to the popcorn bucket.
The tomato represents professional critics from outlets like Variety, The New York Times, or IndieWire. These are the "pros" whose entire job is to see movies and judge them. I'm not dissing them for having that as their profession. Hell, I wish it were mine. That said, a lot of these critics are there representing the legacy media because they have the "right" opinions.
As you already know, those opinions must lean leftward to be right.
This means that a lot of the ratings you see on sites like Rotten Tomatoes are incredibly biased, and often far harsher than they should be on some films, and far too easy when they shouldn't be on others.
A really great example of this is the new Star Trek show "Starfleet Academy." As I've written about on more than one occasion, the show is so bad that it's an insult to Star Trek and its fans. It's yet another found-family comedy/drama that has gay cross-dressing Klingons and so much representation and girlbossery that it makes "The Acolyte" look tame by comparison.
Read: Modern Star Trek Is the Poster Child for Everything Wrong About Modern Storytelling
The show doesn't insult fans; it insults everyone's intelligence. For instance, one of the climactic moments is finding out that a cluster of bombs that can unmake space has been laid around the border of Federation space. The issue is that, as the show makes clear, the "mines" have been laid in a circle around Federation space, and that the bad guys only need a few hundred.
I'm going to let you figure out why every bit of that is so dumb that my jaw dropped when they made all that plain. They should rename this show to "Starfleet Learing Center."
Yet, to hear the critics tell it, this show is a gem!
A gem that just got announced that it's stopping after its second season, and the only reason it's got a second season is that this was all contracted before Paramount bought Warner Bros., so they kind of have to make it.
My favorite bit about this development comes from Variety, which said:
The first season of “Starfleet Academy” reached an 87% critical approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, with Variety‘s Aramide Tinubu describing it as a “delightful entry point” into the franchise. But the show failed to find a significant audience. Across its 10-episode first season, it has failed to rank on the Nielsen Top 10 streaming viewership charts.
I'm not going to sit here and say there aren't shows and movies out there that don't get the attention they deserve. Plenty of things get highly rated that are tragically never seen by the greater populace... but this was a major franchise being delivered by a major network. The fact that it didn't find its audience despite having all that going for it should tell you that the critics aren't rating a show based on how good it is.
As they've been demonstrating again and again, they're rating it based on how much of their politics is spoken back to them, while the characters and setting mimic something that was previously established by better men and women than they are. What matters is how much "the message" is shown, not how well the art is performed, and especially not in relation to how much general audiences are going to make of it.
In my opinion, a critic can look at a show, a book, a movie, a painting, or a video game and be able to say whether or not it stands on its own merits. They should be able to look at something and know who it will appeal to and who it won't. Even if they don't like it, they can at least appreciate how well the story is put together and how well the characters are fleshed out.
Modern critics largely seem not to have this concern anymore. Too many of them look at something and scale its quality based on how much it scratches their ideological itch. That's not being a critic, that's being a shill.
I'm famously harsh on Christian media despite being a dyed-in-the-wool Christian myself. I don't judge it based on how much it praises my Lord and Savior, but how it delivers that message, because I think a message delivered horribly can ultimately ruin the view of the subject the message is about. I find this a very important aspect of critiquing something, especially when I agree with the underlying message.
But leftist critics don't seem to have that concern. So long as they see it, it's good, and they will defend a creation to the death if they feel it represents their politics. If that's the approach, then the only use they serve is as an alarm bell that what you're about to see is going to be high on leftist politics and low on substance.
Other than that, there's no point to these "critics."
