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I hate Rotten Tomatoes.

I hate the Tomatometer.

I hate what it has done to modern movie consumers.

In this acknowledgment, I wish to be unequivocal; I do not use the word hate freely or lightly. Hate is defined as "intense dispassion or dislike". This is, at best, a mild description of my feelings toward this institution: I despise, detest, abhor, and resent the existence of Rotten Tomatoes. It's been that way since well before it became a standard metric in consumer evaluation, and is likely to remain that way forever.

Let's backtrack. In the early days of Rotten Tomatoes, immediately following its acquisition by IGN, I didn't like it. I didn't know why, in the same way a teenager can't describe their loathing for the person their crush adores instead of them. The first glancing encounter around which my scorn congealed came from my mother: "I don't get it, are the movies supposed to be bad?" she innocently asked. No, I told her, but for the life of me, I couldn't articulate why a site distilling the ratings of critics automatically chose a name with such negative connotations: whether she knew it or not, my mother was supposing that the movies graded on this website had more in common with Plan 9 from Outer Space than Citizen Kane . And it was a reasonable assumption: the word rotten is synonymous with decomposition, mold, and stench. If the first word of a movie reviewing site is intended to conjure disgust, why would anyone assume its mission involves holding the medium to a higher standard?

This, alone, would help calcify that which is "rotten" in modern evaluations of film: that we start with an assumption that we should be appalled. I'm no blanket defender of the mainstream, and believe that movies can always aspire to a higher standard, but I believe wholly in remaining practical about the goals of any film regardless of genre, be it studio, independent, low-budget, no budget, foreign, or domestic. And I think we do them all a disservice by instantaneously associating them with "rottenness".

A further examination reveals that which is "rotten" in this site's aggregation technique: assuming that every critic on the planet were to rate films on a scale in which ★★★★★ is the standard, any review of ★★★ is designated "fresh", thus anything below it is "rotten". In other words, using the Tomatometer's infallible metric, if every critic on the planet gave a film a 3/5, it would be 100% fresh, sanctifying mediocrity in a manner appealing only to the film's marketing department. Such is the badge of honor that any film can be "certified fresh" as long as the majority of its reviews eclipse a halfway point, and the Tomatometer score can be dutifully affixed to posters and home media box art. Somehow, the image of a tomato on the cover of a work of art apparently translates as a seal of approval; to think, I used to scoff at the Oscars as an advertising tool!

It gets worse: since a ★★★★★ metric effectively creates a ten-point scale, the Tomatometer acclaims ★★★ and sneers at ★★½, meaning that Rotten Tomatoes adjudicates success or failure within the margin of a single point! The Tomatometer quantifies cinematic achievement as either "bad" or "good": there are no "ripe" or "edible" tomatoes, they can only be "disgusting" or "delicious". "Festering" or "flavorful". "Rotten" or "fresh".

I don't think the blame for this can be laid solely at the throne of the Tomatometer, but it is emblematic of attitudes endemic in modern film evaluation. Audiences at large place absolutely no premium whatsoever upon moderation; each new entry is either the best film ever made, or the worst. The intensity of the rhetoric in attack or defense has replaced reason and measure. All because a movie has to be either "bad" or "good".

How is the extermination of temperance in any way constructive to artistic dialogue?

I'm not averse to the notion of reviews in the aggregate, nor do I oppose the practicalities of doing so. In fact, I think MetaCritic does an outstanding job distilling critical ratings into scores that it then classifies as "good" (green), "bad" (red), or "middling" (yellow). Moreover, its process of arriving at those numbers and assignations not only makes logical sense, it leaves room for interpretation.

What Rotten Tomatoes does, on the other hand, is not "good". It is "bad". It eradicates a necessary middle-ground that determines what most people would define as "taste". The "consensus" it establishes is not productive, but destructive; anyone relying on the Tomatometer for quality film recommendations adheres not to high standards, but the involuntary whims of an aggregate that rewards anything north of mediocrity while decimating anything south. And the effect on anyone who views him or herself to be a specious authority on the subject has been profound: any film that excites a viewer is instantly hailed "a masterpiece", while anything even passively disliked is labeled "garbage".

You have to give them credit: they've marketed their services successfully enough that they've been adopted as an advertising arm of the industry, one that has made people predicate their willingness to spend two hours in the embrace of artistry or escapism on a "score" arrived at so apathetically it can hardly be said to have been "arrived at" at all.

Is there a solution? Not a practical one: we need to stop trying to distill mass appraisal down to a grade, because it's not the rating that matters, it's the conversation. I would personally rather listen to someone gush about their love for a movie I hated than try to shut them down with the statistics of a decaying fruit vendor. In many ways, that's what Rotten Tomatoes is: a specious adjudicator that does as much to sow division as it does to decimate the value extracted from a difference of opinion. I regularly see movies brought up for discussion turned victims of these vile assessments. The funny thing is, I also regularly see the distrust people harbor for the crisper variety: the metric is so stained by its inherent pessimism and unreliability that the label of "certified fresh" has begun to reek of putrescence.

I would argue that the model thusly collapses under its own pretensions: it is a site designed to simplify film assessment that needlessly complicates it in support of the notion that art itself is either "rotten" or "fresh", when such aggregation would be worth absolutely nothing if it weren't backed by the capital of valued literary assessments by critics. Those critics, by the way, stake their livelihood on making arguments for and against the values of any given film; they may render grades, but they are accompanied not by statements, but educated opinions with which we can freely agree or disagree.

My opinion on the matter? Art has no arbiter, and requires no stamp of approval that is not your own. Its value is derived from whether or not you like it, and why it has an impact on you. So stick with your gut and see what looks interesting, or find out about new movies from someone who knows you, rather than rely on a rancid berry juggernaut for advice.

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