I like looking at the overall ratings of movies on the rottentomatoes.com site and often find the information fascinating.

There has been, however, plenty of criticism leveled at the website and some is very legitimate.

For example, I suspect this site contributed to the overall negative feelings toward the release of Justice League.  By holding back their overall score when two days before that movie’s release reviews were open to the public, rottentomatoes decided to premiere their overall results days later on their own “show”.  This made many speculate/suspect (darkly) that Warner Brothers was somehow holding back reviews and that the film was of course a total bust… this despite the fact that reviews were open -again!- two days before that movie’s release.

(Btw, in my opinion Justice League did about what it should have, box office wise, in the end.  It was a fun film, IMHO, but it was clearly something of a Frankenstein monster.  The fact that it was as good as it was considering all the stuff happening behind the scenes and the -also ridiculous- need to release it when they did (come on, Warners, you’ve had a great year in box office take… you could have delayed the film’s release to get it done “right”) is a tribute to the talent of the people behind -and in front of!- the camera.)

Anyway, Star Wars: The Last Jedi is two days away from being released (Just like Justice League was!) and rottentomatoes.com has the movie current pegged at an impressive 93% positive among critics.

I checked out some of the reviews and, not to sound like too much of a overly detail oriented fuddy-duddy, I’m beginning to think rottentomatoes’ black and white “good or bad” system of scoring could use shades of gray.

Understand: I’ve not come to some startlingly original/new realization here.  There are plenty of others out there who have noted sometimes a film is listed as “fresh” (ie, good) or, conversely, “bad” on rottentomatoes when the review itself is far more nuanced than those two black and white terms would suggest.

As I was going through the reviews (clearly having waaaay too much free time on my hands this A.M.), I stumbled upon this review by Josh Larson and presented on larsononfilm.com as a “fresh”/good review.

What struck me was the quote listed next to his review on rottentomatoes (which had a link to the full review) and the score given to the film.  First, the full quote from Mr. Larson’s review: …a bit of a placeholder.  The reviewer’s score was listed below that: 2.5 out of 4.

Hardly, I felt, an enthusiastic sounding review!

Looking for more information, I clicked on the full review (and you can do the same if you want to with the link a few paragraphs above) and, while I tend to agree that overall Mr. Larson’s view of the film is positive, it is hardly a slam dunk in favor of the film.  Indeed, and I’ll freely admit that maybe I’m reading between the lines, I get the impression from the review that Mr. Larsen is one of those Star Wars fans who is grasping for positives while (perhaps more reluctantly) pointing out the negatives.

There is, alas, reason to believe this might be the case.

Opinions on films -indeed, most art forms- can be very fluid.  What you may like -or detest!- at one moment might become, over time, viewed in the opposite manner.  As I’ve stated before, I’m a HUGE fan of Alfred Hitchcock’s films (though Alfred Hitchcock, the human being, was a very weird individual).  Yet for many years I couldn’t understand why people liked The Birds as much as they did.  I’d seen it and thought it was a bust, a strange film with a very strange plot and even more strange ending.

And then it occurred to me one day, out of the blue, the film was Mr. Hitchcock’s incredibly clever subversion of what was a very popular movie genre to that point: The radioactive/supersized monster films that followed in the wake of the release of Godzilla.  Only Mr. Hitchcock took just about every one of that then-fresh genre’s cliches and subverted them completely.  While in films like Godzilla you have a spectacularly big creature wrecking everything around (and usually taking down famous monuments), in The Birds you had ordinary, everyday creatures attacking a picturesque but essentially no-name place.  In films like Godzilla, you have things like a massive military fighting off the monster, a brilliant scientist usually coming up with a way of taking down the monster, and our heroes ultimately triumphing in the end.  In The Birds, not so much.

Getting back to Star Wars, when the originally trilogy was done and the new, prequel trilogy was announced, the movie’s myriad fans understandably went nuts.  When the first of the films, The Phantom Menace, came out, reviews were generally positive among fans and critics, but over time (and unlike my feelings toward The Birds), those same fans and critics re-assessed the movie and today many view it as mediocre or outright poor.  Feelings regarding the two follow-up prequel films tread the same general pattern, first elation and then reassessment.

Even for 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens, the first of the “new” Star Wars films being released by Disney, the early reviews by fans and critics were mostly ecstatic but over time, some noted the film’s flaws and once overall fawning reviews has since cooled.

At least somewhat.

While TFA is still viewed mostly positively (I think, anyway), I suspect there are few today who view it as being “up there” with the best of Star Wars… perhaps it falls just shy for some and/or lower for others.

Regardless of all this, I know the latest Star Wars film will do extremely well upon its release two days from today.

As for me, I’ll catch it at some point, perhaps before I catch Rogue One.