Why is rotten tomatoes so harsh?

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Has anyone noticed that rotten tomatoes critics are overly cynical and jaded? They gang up on movies that are religious or that have a good heart, while they praise dark and nihilistic movies. For example Patch Adams and Miracles From Heaven got 23% and 43% respectively while the Dark Knight got a 94%. It just disgusts me.
 
First, Rotten Tomatoes simply aggregates the reviews from a variety of sources. You can’t say Rotten Tomatoes gives high or low rankings, it’s what the critics say about the movies.

Frankly, a lot of religiously oriented movies are pretty badly made. I’m not surprised when they get low scores because the only people they’re designed to appeal to are hardcore religious folks who will overlook their flaws.

And it’s not just religiously themed movies that get low rankings. Looking at the movies at the theater right now I see:
  • Fifty Shades Freed - 12%
  • The 15:17 to Paris - 25%
  • Winchester - 11%
While I see a fair number of movies (thank you, MoviePass!) I haven’t seen these because the critics have been universally harsh. Why waste my time?
 
I never read reviews. I don’t care what some random internet person recommends. I see what interests me or things that people I personally know have seen and recommend.
 
Yup.

A lot of “religious” movies are poorly made propaganda that are talk down to the audience. I’m thinking about stuff like, “God’s Not Dead”. They assume the audience is dumb as rocks, so they beat you over the head with the “message” to make sure no one could possibly miss it. Lot of one dimensional characters with zero nuance or subtlety.

There ARE plenty of good movies with Christian themes, but you have to think about them a little. They usually don’t hit you with a giant flashing “HEY THIS IS A CHRISTIAN MOVIE CHURCH GOOD ATHEISTS BAD” neon sign the whole time.

And yeah, you can’t blame Rotten Tomatoes. They don’t “give” scores. They just average what the critics say.
 
What I hated most was the rotten tomatoes score for The Greatest Showman. You know there is a problem when the critics give a movie a 55% rating and the audience gives it an 89% rating.
 
And sometimes it goes the other way – an “artsy” type of film that the critics love but the audiences don’t. I find it helpful to look at both scores and kind of balance them.

Sometimes, too, people just want to stir up trouble. Black Panther has a 97% critics score and a 79% audience score. I might buy that if it weren’t for the fact that the movie has made $900 million dollars worldwide.
 
I have indeed noticed that they’re harsh, but I haven’t noticed a correlation with films being religious, aside from that, as @BoomBoomMancini said, many religious films are poorly made. They end up being corny and unrealistic. I do enjoy some of them, even so, but someone who wasn’t already quite sympathetic to the message wouldn’t overlook the flaws so easily. Historic films that actually revolve around real historic Christians and saints tend to be significantly better, IMO even on par with some of the best film-making out there, but they also tend to be niche, so you just don’t hear a lot about them.

Like I said, in general sometimes I think Rotten Tomatoes reviewers seem hard to please with movies of all types, secular and otherwise, but I actually think that’s because I tend to go easy on movies if there’s anything remotely likable about them. If a film has a basically a good plot, a decent message, is a genre I’m into, and puts in a good effort, I can find things to like about it, and try to focus on those.
 
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Good policy. I do read reviews, but aside from if they tell me something is IN the movie that I myself just don’t want to watch or pay for, the opinion of the reviewer doesn’t tend to sway me unless he’s giving some objective, concrete details about why he thinks the film’s bad and I happen to share his opinion about whatever those flaws are. Like if he says the film is boring, it won’t necessarily sway me, but if he says it’s boring because it spends 2/3 of its runtime on X,Y, Z, and I agree that X, Y, and Z are boring for my preferences, then that’s when I’ll let it influence my decision, though I may do a little of my own digging to confirm that it’s really as dominated by those factors as the reviewer says.
 
Nihilistic? The Dark Knight was about a wealthy capitalist, whose faith in humanity allows him to overcome a Niestchean terrorist. I recommend Andrew Klavan’s review. It was pretty pronouncedly conservative - and specifically anti-nihilist.

Also, lotta good religious movies get good reviews. And every one of these, critics’ percentage of positive reviews, was HIGHER than the audience percentage of positive reviews. The critics liked these MORE than audiences did.

Calvary - 90%
Secret of Kells -91%
The Ten Commandments - 94%
Hail, Caesar- 85%
A Serious Man - 90%

There are a couple religious films, I think a number of critics underrated. The Passion of the Christ, for example. It also surprises that more critics didn’t like The Mission or Prince of Egypt (although a majority DID LIKE THEM). But the films you mentioned were not good. They were just bad.
 
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Well to be fair dark nihilistic movies do tend to be better than happy uplifting ones. I hate happy endings 😬
 
That’s a matter of taste, but objectively, the only movie he mentioned as nihilistic, was aggressively anti-nihilist. This is made even clearer in the trilogy’s third installment.
 
True. But the dark knight was the best of the three and heath ledgers joker was incredible. His embodiment of chaotic evil was perfect.
 
Oh, yeah. My point is that, let’s not lose sight of the fact that the movie’s message is the opposite of the OP’s interpretation.
 
Ok maybe Dark Knight wasn’t a good example. But the movie se7en was certainly nihilistic, wouldn’t you agree?
 
I disagree. The ending is not happy by any stretch, but that does not make the message of the film that our lives have no meaning or that morality is not real.

But I don’t like talking too much about se7en because spoilers so we can agree to disagree on that one.
 
But my more central point was that I can list several religious movies with a quick google search, that rotten tomatoes critics loved, and that they liked more than the audiences did, indicating that an attitude to Christian cinema that rewards films for worldview alone is not the most effective way of engaging the culture available to us.
 
I agree that having an unhappy ending is not necessarily nihilistic. I enjoy horror films, for example, and while I prefer those with somewhat happy endings, some of them do end on bleaker notes for the specific events happening onscreen. Some specific situations in life don’t have happy endings, and there can be something cathartic about acknowledging that and “mourning” it through the arts. It doesn’t mean that there’s no greater meaning to life, though. It’s just that sometimes, even if ultimately God is in control and “all things work to the good of those who love the Lord,” sometimes that only fully reveals itself in the next life. There is tragedy, there is death, there is loss. It’s not the final word, but sometimes it’s still pretty imposing. And almost everyone has at least one significant situation where things ended or seem to permanently stand on a bad note. So we can relate to characters and plots where that’s the case.

That said, I don’t like films that are too bleak even if not technically nihilist. Being too bleak and depressing can carry problems of its own, even if it technically isn’t nihilist. It’s hard to say where that line is, but I think cynicism in art is probably often just as unhealthy as nihilism, and some works that technically avoid nihilism still fall into cynicism or morbid pessimism. Even then, in some contexts, some level of bleak melancholy and pessimism can just be realistic and give people who are IN those kinds of sad situations something to relate to. For example, The Scarlet Letter is at times a pretty cynical and pessimistic outlook on the prospects for life for an adulteress in a Puritan town, but it’s realistic and anyone who has ever been scared of being shunned or made into an outcast for some mistake can relate to it. For people in those shoes, stories like that can make them feel like someone understands their position, so they can feel less alone by reading it. So it has its place, it just has to be done carefully and with good motives, I think.
 
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