Yesterday I was frankly stunned to find that over on rottentomatoes.com the latest Star Wars film, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, after receiving so much near universal love by critics (who currently have the film at a very lofty 93% positive), has far, far less love from audiences.  Yesterday, only 57% of them felt the film was good.  That rating has dropped a point to 56% today, with a total of 97,100+ reviews.

As a comparison, the much reviled Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice has a 63% positive with nearly 230,000 audience reviews offered.

I still find this just… incredible.

If nothing else, Star Wars: The Last Jedi (let’s refer to it as LJ from here on) is -obviously!- splitting audiences and fans almost right down the middle.

Because I clearly have way too much free time on my hands, I read through many of the audience reactions presented, both positive and negative, and found the following (and this ain’t brain surgery, folks):

The reactions are split into three distinct camps:

1. Those who love the film
2. Those who feel the film was good but not great (this seems to be the smallest group)
3. Those who hated the film

The ones who love the film feel it was an emotional tour de force, that it was filled with great action, excitement, and plenty of surprises.  They felt an emotional connection to the cast and characters and were floored by many of the surprises presented within the feature.  Some have also noted the film actually presents a clever theme: One involving failure.  Each and every main character in the film, they note fails in their own way, which may well be a way of then showing them, in the next film, learning from their mistakes and succeeding where they failed before (until the final film in this most recent trilogy is released, obviously, this is a complete guess on my and some other audience reviewers’ part).

The middle group, which appears to be the smallest of the three groups offering their opinions on the film, note, among other things, that LJ is a decent/good “action/sci-fi” film but not a very good Star Wars film.  In other words, that this film doesn’t feel like it belong to the others, and many wonder whether director/writer Rian Johnson “gets” the Star Wars universe.

I find that analysis fascinating because, to some degree, this critique, only far more negative, appears and repeats by many in the third group, those who feel the film is terrible.

Many of these complaints center on the story: That it is full of holes, that there are parts of it that were better left on the cutting room floor.  Though I haven’t seen the film, some of those who even liked the film admitted its second act was too slow and/or unnecessary.

Now, let me repeat: I haven’t seen the film but as I didn’t think I’d catch it in theaters anyway, I didn’t mind reading some of the comments and critiques and having parts -indeed the whole- of the story spoiled.

Another bit of criticism I’ve found repeated by many who didn’t like the film (and even among some who did) was that they felt the film’s makers had contempt for the character of Luke Skywalker.  That’s not to say they thought Mark Hamill was bad in playing the character again over for the first time after so many years.  Quite the contrary, most feel his acting was one of the film’s highlights.  What they felt was bad was what he became since last seen in Return of the Jedi.

What’s fascinating about that is that before the film’s release, actor Mark Hamill, in an interview with Vanity Fair, said the following regarding his reaction to first reading the film’s script:

…after reading Rian Johnson’s script for The Last Jedi, Hamill said, “I at one point had to say to Rian, ‘I pretty much fundamentally disagree with every choice you’ve made for this character. Now, having said that, I have gotten it off my chest, and my job now is to take what you’ve created and do my best to realize your vision.’ ”

Good, bad, or indifferent, clearly the film will make huge box off money this week.

The big question, given how many people seem to not like the film: How big of a drop off will we see in week 2?

I’ll most certainly be curious to see.

Time, as with so many other things, will tell.

Arguably the release of Star Wars: The Last Jedi has been one of the, if not the movie most sci-fi fans have been  anxiously awaiting.

Word was this film was very well received, and Disney studios so pleased with the final product, that director Rian Johnson was given free reign to create a new Star Wars trilogy which, according to him, didn’t even require much of a pitch.

Then came the reviews, and they were for the most part ecstatic.  Currently, the film is currently charting an incredibly high 93% positive among critics.  I wrote, however, a couple of days back about the fact that a) Rottentomatoes has a habit of lumping films into a good or bad category with little space for grays, and b) based on at least one review I found (granted, an exceedingly small sampling) I further wondered if maybe the critics were enamored more the Star Wars brand and were perhaps willing to overlook the film’s flaws.

Regarding that later point, I wondered if that was the case that maybe this film, like the Prequel films before it, would over time find people re-assessing their views on it.  I’m old enough to recall that the Prequel films -each and every one of them- were met with near complete adulation but over time people’s opinions of them soured and many now view them as not very good.

So too was the case, for some, with 2015’s Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  People loved the film when it came out and it made a boat load of money but now, two years later, I suspect many see the film in a somewhat harsher light, even if they may not feel it was a complete bust.

Having said all that, what I didn’t expect, not in a million years, was the audience/fan reaction to this film.

As I mentioned above and if you go by rottentomatoes.com, critics loved the film.

Audiences?

Not so much.

Again, click here for the rottentomatoes.com score for Star Wars: The Last Jedi and you’ll find that while critics are 93% positive, audiences are at…

…hang on to your hats…

57%

Let that sink in for a moment.

The Force Awakens currently has an 88% positive rating by audiences over on rottentomatoes.com.

For further comparison, let’s look at the audience reaction to two recently released (and still in theaters in one case) action/adventure/sci-fi films that one could say are in the same general genre field:

Thor: Ragnarock has a 88% positive rating among audiences.

Justice League has an 80% positive rating among audiences.

Whoa.

Also being released this weekend and to little fanfare is Beyond Skyline, a sequel to a barely remembered sci-fi alien invasion film.  Currently, its rottentomatoes.com audience approval rating sits at 55%, just two points below Star Wars: The Last Jedi.

As I said before, I did not see this coming at all.

As you also may know, if you’ve been following this blog for any length of time, I’m not a huge Star Wars fan.  Though I was of the right at at the right time when the original film was released way back in 1977 and had/have a huge interest in all things sci-fi, Star Wars simply didn’t do all that much for me.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean I’m feeling glee at these frankly shocking review numbers.  I’ve always been a “live and let live” type guy and if Star Wars is your sci-fi nirvana, more power to you.

Even if Star Wars doesn’t do it for me personally, being so into sci-fi, I’m intrigued to read about the latest news/reviews on any sci-fi works, including Star Wars films.

Now, we are in only the opening days of the release of this film so perhaps people’s opinions will change in time.

The big question is: Will these opinions mellow over time, or become still more harsh?

We will see.

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.