Critical Accuracy?

As many of you may know, I don't read the reviews of movies I intend to see and review. This has been, at times, a difficult challenge because I prefer to be informed before I go into a movie. That being said, I have found it interesting that nearly all of my reviews have fallen right in line with the "Tomatometer" from Rotten Tomatoes (which is my favorite resource for movie review information), in many cases my reviews have been within 5% points of the "Tomatometer".

My review of Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen was the first movie that not only did not line up with general consensus, but was nearly opposite of most reviews. The "Tomatometer" for Transformers was a 20%, my review was a 80%. This extremely different opinion of the movie led me to thinking... What would cause such a wide gap between my opinion and that of a large group of others? I came to the conclusion that people's expectations going into a movie have a profound impact on how they respond to the movie they watch.

To help me illustrate how my expectations led me to my conclusion, here are several questions I asked myself (though not until after I had actually written my review). Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen loaded with action? Yes. Does it have tons of giant robots fighting? Yes. Are the Transformers recreated with amazing detail and reality? Yes. Does the movie have some highly memorable lines? Yes. These answer's allude to a movie that has quite a number of positive strengths. However, when laid against a list of different questions such as... Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a perfect movie? No. Are there numerous plot holes? Yes. Is the CGI perfect? No. Is the acting anything to be praised? No. ...the movie seems to come up lacking.

Whatever a person's review of a movie is, including mine, the readers must remember that a review is simply a person's opinion as compared to their expectations. I think this is why many off the radar movies score so highly with the critics... They aren't expecting anything great, so they aren't disappointed. The opposite is also true, when their expectations are high the movie is nearly certain to disappoint on some level (as I addressed in my review of X-Men: Origins).

People weren't entirely sure what to expect with the first Transformers movie and it scored a 57% on the "Tomatometer". People had very high expectations of the sequel and were ultimately disappointed with it. However, I thought that despite it's flaws it was a much more full and impressive movie than the first. The few complaints that I did have with the first were much less apparent or completely corrected in the sequel. Yet, despite these improvements the movie is being criticized as a "mindless, souless sequel" or as one reviewer said "more robotic nonsense". I'm not going to say that any of these reviewer's opinions are wrong, but I think that going into the movie expecting a script of Shakespearean proportions and acting of the same caliber is pure nonsense.

I think that Michael Bay achieved what he wanted to with the film; an action packed thrill ride with huge robots and randomly inserted comic relief. Yet, despite all of these negative reviews it has still scored huge in the box office (currently sitting at over $360 million), so what do all the negative reviews really mean? Apparently not much to all the people that have paid $10+ to see it...

This isn't the first time where I've been at extreme odds with reviewers... This whole situation actually reminds me of another couple of movies that suffered fatally from overly heightened expectations, any one remember the Matrix sequels... Don't worry, I won't get started on that debate... :)