Over on Salon.com, Matthew Rosza offers a list of…

26 Films Rotten Tomatoes Got 100% Wrong

As someone posted on the comments to the article, the premise is incorrect: Rotten Tomatoes takes critical reactions and makes a simple average of them.  Thus, if seven out of ten critics liked Movie X, then the movie receives a 70% approval rating.  On the other hand, if a movie finds favor in only 2 out of 10 critics, you get a 20% approval rating.

Got it?

Ok then!

Now, ignoring the incorrect premise of the article (It probably should have been 26 Films The Critics Rotten Tomatoes Uses To Average Films Out Got 100% Wrong), it offers some interesting food for thought, especially for someone who loves reading opinions as much as I do.

While I won’t go over every film in the list (that would take way too much time and effort… not to mention there are some films I haven’t seen and therefore could not offer an opinion about), I do think there is a fascinating element articles like this point out: How opinions on films (and, for that matter, anything artistic) can change over time.

Sometimes, its a matter of audiences not necessarily “getting” the film when it was originally released.  Sometimes, it may be a more superficial reaction.

When I saw Star Trek: Into Darkness, I recall being entertained by the film and liking it well enough.  In fact, I found it more enjoyable than the first of the “New” Star Trek films, which to me had a tremendous amount of plot holes (not that Into Darkness didn’t).  Still, I liked it enough to write up a recommended review.

But as time passed and I thought about what I just saw, the film’s merits became… less.  In fact, I found myself thinking less and less of the film and, today, feel it was no more than mediocre at best.

Then there’s the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds (no, this movie is not listed in the article above).  I’m a fan of Mr. Hitchcock’s films (and let’s just ignore his weird personal issues), but I couldn’t understand what people liked about that film.  It didn’t scare me, it didn’t intrigue me, and I felt the movie’s non-ending was frustrating.

And then, in a flash, I suddenly realized something: The Birds was Mr. Hitchcock doing his version of what in the 1950’s and into the early 1960s was a very popular sci-if/horror genre: The “oversized” monster terrorizing humanity films.  Godzilla, Them!, Mothra, etc. etc.

These films had developed certain storytelling cliches: The monster was often a smaller, pretty ugly creature rendered monstrously large and dangerous.  There are usually plenty of military hardware present.  The handsome leads persevere.  The films usually ends with some kind of new, “killer” formula or explosive that saves humanity’s bacon.

What Mr. Hitchcock did, ingeniously, was to take every single one of those genre cliches and invert them.  There was no “colossally” large menace.  In fact, the menace was an animal humanity essentially takes for granted: The common bird.  There was no military presence.  At all.

The spunky leading lady is left so shaken as to barely be able to walk or talk.  The handsome leading man is left in a similar predicament, happy to get his loved ones out of dodge.

And the ending?  There is no secret weapon that saves everyone.  There is no clever scientific solution.  We’re screwed.  The end.

With that realization, a film I thought was no good suddenly became incredibly good to me.  Excellent, even.  Easily one of Mr. Hitchcock’s last true masterpieces.

So read the list and check out the opinions.  Of the films I’ve seen, I mostly agree they may have received either too good or too bad a review.  But again, that’s on the critics and not necessarily on Rotten Tomatoes.