What is the Point of Hundreds of Reviews for Jurassic World Dominion?

As of now, there are 173 reviews for Jurassic World Dominion. Do we really need that many reviews of what is basically a dumb Summer movie? What is the point of that?

What is the benefit of having that many? How can we get any value from it beyond a general score, which is often different from the general score offered up by audience members?

I haven’t yet seen Jurassic World Dominion. I was actually looking forward to seeing it. I was excited by the trailer. But when I saw the overwhelmingly negative reviews it put me off. I know I am not the only one. I don’t know exactly how many people would be put off by that score.

I’m gonna have to go with these three as my encouragement to see this movie. Rachel Leishman has me intrigued. Does a velociraptor see race? Catalina Combs is singing my tune, I think. High energy, fun, final chapter – sold.

Heading over to Metacritic, we see that there are 49 reviews with a score that isn’t that different from RT’s:

The industry that delivers films in actual movie theaters feels like it’s shrinking, but the number of film critics seems to be growing every day.  I am not sure the problem is so much the number of film critics on offer so much as it is the uniformity of thought, although Metacritic does seem to offer a more varied look at those opinions. Since they use more of a score system and less of a binary – bad or good – it’s easier to see the nuance.

I’m just wondering, right now, if this is something the film industry needs and whether or not it is genuinely disrupting their economic model – or whether any of that matters.

The disconnect between critics and audience ratings is starting to be a thing people talk about “out there” in the “real world” that isn’t plugged into the insular hive mind online. The main difference is that critics are mostly invited to see movies for free and offer up a critical take that goes beyond their own personal experiences. Their opinions are judged by readers an by their fellow critics. By contrast, audience reviews are simply judging the movie without being worried about the panopticon.

Sometimes the audience rating can be a bit of a populist uprising, if you will, against the consensus by the critics or, in some cases, the politics involved. For instance, What is a Woman has an extraordinarily high audience rating. That probably can’t be trusted since it displays a kind of tribal loyalty. There have been longstanding accusations against “fanboy” types that punish a film deemed too politically Left, or “feminist.” It seems to go both ways, however. Politics seems to influence both critics and audiences when it comes to producing a definitive score. Sometimes they can be trusted. Sometimes they can’t.

I guess the idea is to know your genre, know your critics, know your audiences. A crowd that likes horror movies is going to judge a horror movie differently than your average person. They know what they’re looking for and whether or not the film delivers. In general, I think, a really really bad score for a film that isn’t being targeted for its politics is usually a pretty good indicator that the movie is bad. Likewise, a super duper high score on a movie is also usually somewhat suspect. It can often indicate an agenda is at play. This is especially true, I have found, on Audible. If a book has no bad reviews it has been captured by a base of one kind or another.  I find I avoid those kinds of books because most of Audible is dominated by a certain kind of person and if they’re overpraising a book there is usually some sort of social justice component, aka “woke.”

I don’t want anyone to lose their job. People who love writing about film, or more importantly, get paid to write a film should still continue doing that. At some point, though, we’re going to have to tweak the model, especially if it really is true that the only kinds of movies that will eventually play in theaters will be movies like this one.

Then again, we also have the highly rated Top Gun Maverick and Everything, Everywhere All At Once, both did well with critics, audiences and box office.