How critics on the Internet qualify a movie?

Christian David Bauza Gomes

A01375193

English A Group 60

How critics on the Internet qualify a movie?

Movies, like books or video games, are media that offer pleasure to its viewers through a story, characters, effects, camera movement and setting. Whether it is through a theater, through a compact disc (DVD, Blu-Ray), or even through the Internet with services like Netflix, a movie’s purpose is to entertain its viewer in all the ways it possibly can and appeal to all his senses and maybe even emotions. These ways a movie appeals to its audience to cause feelings of fear, happiness, depression and anger are often graded like procedures and results in a math test by high degree critics who know how to use language in their critiques to justify their two cents on why the movie has a certain score or certain stars. People then listen or read these reviews in order to amplify their perspective and make a decision on whether to see the picture or not.

Although most reviews of movies can be seen in magazines or newspapers, people turn to the Internet to check the scores of the film in different web pages. Some of the most popular pages to check reviews, consensuses and scores from people about the most recent or popular movies are Rotten Tomatoes, Metacritic, IMDb, and the Roger Ebert website. Each site has their own way of qualifying a movie based on every single thing: acting, direction, cinematography, visual or special effects, story and way of telling it and how the setting fits with the story the film is telling.

One way critics score their movies is by giving them a number from 0 to 100 (0=Terrible, 100=Perfect). Rotten Tomatoes is one of these sites. The main score of each film is featured on their home page and if the user clicks on the film, he or she sees the critic score and sees the number based on what they thought of the movie (Red bar if “Fresh”, green bar if “Rotten”). In RT, when a movie is certified “Fresh”, it goes from score of 79% to 100%. When certified “Rotten”, it goes from below or equals 50. For example: “Zootopia” in RT is certified fresh with a score 98% while “Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice” is certified rotten with a score of 28% based on critics. However, RT has another score that is from the people with an account on the site and also take their word for the movie with an Audience Score that certifies a movie as recommended with an image of a bowl of popcorn standing tall and not recommended when the popcorn is dropped on the floor piece by piece.

Whichever is one’s preferences over which site to trust, they all help him or her make a more solid decision on what to watch based on what he or she is looking for in a film and generate own thoughts based on everything he or she saw in it. What will your next film be when the scores arrive?