On Judging Movies, Part 1:
A Lousy Criterion For Criticizing Films
People have very strong opinions about movies, opinions that rival, in passionate fervor, those of politics and religion. For example, many middle-aged Star Wars fans take personal offense to The Phantom Menace (‘99); and SW fans, a few years older, complain about Return of the Jedi (‘83); a number of my acquaintances feel “violated” by Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull (‘08); and quite a few Trekkies are ashamed of Star Trek: The Motion Picture (‘79). Whether hated movies are actually bad or not (they very well may be), given the common criteria of critics, I’ve come to realize that people don’t know what makes a good movie GOOD.
An unfair expectation about stories have skewed people’s judgments of movies: many think that every story, depending on its assigned genre, needs a set of predetermined ingredients in order to be good. In other words, they think that all good fantasy/sci-fi stories need fast paces and explosions; that all good romantic tales need people who are in love and who have sexual encounters; and that all good horror movies need blood and gore. In short, people expect a particular kind of excitement when they watch a movie.
I admit that the above expectations are sometimes helpful in diagnosing unappealing movies, but they can also lead people to unfairly criticize genuinely good films. Let’s use Star Trek: The Motion Picture as Exhibit One in our case against the occasional misdiagnoses of good stories.
It is NOT About Excitement
No matter how many times I watch ST:TMP, it keeps on giving. As you can probably tell, I really like this movie. TMP was released in 1979, almost 10 years after the original Star Trek television series was canceled, so it was highly anticipated by sci-fi buffs and Trekkies. Unfortunately, after the hype died down, people were disappointed. Fans and filmmakers alike thought it was cinematically less than successful.
Because of Star Trek: The Motion Picture‘s lack of laser shootouts, intergalactic naval battles, and quick scene changes, it has been given nicknames like Star Trek: The Slow Motion Picture. Those who do not like TMP suggest that more action and shorter scenes will improve it. I’m not sure if those changes will make TMP better, but they will certainly give it a different tone, a tone that is, to me, nails on a chalkboard.
I must confess that The Motion Picture is one of those movies that I crave at least once a year. Before I knew what others had thought about the movie, I was open about my preference of TMP. Eventually an Internet community of Trekkies indirectly told me that I wasn’t supposed to prefer it. After discovering that ST:TMP was a “failure” — “the worst” of the Star Trek movies — I confined my hankering to the closet.
And, to be honest, I couldn’t argue with the critics of TMP. Their facts were not wrong: the “suspenseless” scenes are, indeed, so-many-minutes (“too”) long; and the film is, admittedly, heavy on visual effects. So without a reasonable defense of TMP, I caved in and removed the film from my mental list of all-time favorite movies.
(Despite my explicit rejection of it, I still ended up re-watching Star Trek: The Motion Picture more times than the other, publicly approved, ST movies.)
Eventually I found the courage to go public with my preference of TMP. This openness led to debates.
Someone once told me that he considered ST:TMP “only art” and that he could not bring himself to call it a movie. (So movies are not art?) TMP was apparently too calm and monotonous to be a “real” movie. I believe that this critic speaks for many people. In order for pop culture to consider a motion picture a “real movie”, it must play a kind a peek-a-boo with our senses; it must satisfy our glut for information while increasing our heart rates.
Together, this ensemble of electronic techniques called into being a new world — a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment, then vanishes again. It is a world without much coherence or sense; a world that does not ask us, indeed, does not permit us to do anything; a world that is, like the child’s game of peek-a-boo, entirely self-contained. But like peek-a-boo, it is also endlessly entertaining.[1]
It is disturbing to hear someone say that a narrative requires exciting elements to attain movie status. Such a person is like the man who insists he watches pornography for the plot: “I just can’t enjoy a film without the rush — stories worth watching need exciting movement.”
I question his taste in movies.
A soap opera or a rollercoaster ride would serve just as well if the only aim of moviegoers is to excite “a rapid flutter of the nerves”[2] (to borrow a phrase from literary critic, C.S. Lewis who wrote on a similar subject). Stories, therefore, should not have to rely on emotional and physical stimulation to be good.
Of course we must not confuse excitement with danger. Lewis, himself, admits that dangers “there must be: how else can you keep a story going?”[3] But the danger need not always be the kind that gets our adrenaline pumping. The danger of a heroic cancer patient — or that of a funny newscaster who is miraculously trapped in an ever-repeating Groundhog Day[4] — makes for a very engaging and mind-altering story.
If we take the excitement logic to its conclusion, we’d have to say that Michael Bay movies are better, overall, than Steven Spielberg movies. Because, for example, Transformers (’07) offers more rollercoaster suspense than Schindler’s List (‘93), we would have to conclude that the former is better. We’d be forced to say, in other words, that a relative lack of excitement demotes a movie to “mere art”.
If you still think excitement is the key to a movie’s success, consider these three questions:
1. Is a previously exciting movie, that you consider good, just as exciting when you re-watch it?
- If not, excitement is not your main criterion for valuing movies.
2. Does already knowing the twist endings or startling moments of a movie discourage you from re-visiting it?
- If not, excitement is not your main criterion for valuing movies.
3. Have you ever had the urge to re-watch, and RE-re-watch a film that doesn’t always excite you?
- If yes, excitement is not your main criterion for valuing movies.
When judging films, we need firm ground on which to base our criticisms. A movie may excite us once, but — if we’re in the wrong mood or if the excitement depends on never having watched the movie before — not again. If excitement were really the basis of a movie’s goodness, the goodness of a movie would be relative, and such subjectivity would give us no grounds to disagree. In other words, saying “that movie was bad” would be the same as saying “I wasn’t excited watching that movie”. It would be futile, therefore, to defend or criticize movie reviews. The only appropriate reply to “that movie is good” would be “oh, were you?”
You may be thinking, “Okay, I see your point. Excitement doesn’t necessarily make a movie good. So what is it that makes us want to re-watch, and re-re-watch, a movie? Why does Star Trek: The Motion Picture appeal to people despite its scarcity of excitement?”
For an exploration of those questions, please check out Part 2.
© 2016, Daniel Asperheim
[1] Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
[2] C.S. Lewis, On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature, “On Stories” (New York: Harcourt, 1982), 6.
[3] Ibid., 4.
[4] Groundhog Day (1993).
