Destroy All Monsters: Film Critics In Deep Space

Two weeks before Gone Girl was released in theatres, the embargo lifted on its reviews and every online publication that had the clout to enlist a reviewer to see the film ahead of time posted their fully-digested thoughts on the film. Two days later, the "backlash" pieces appeared; two days after that, the "think pieces."

Approximately a week or so later, the film itself was seen by the purported readers of all this online content. Reports vary on how quickly that readership backtracked through their search history to find the Gone Girl think pieces they had seen or not seen a week or more prior to the film's release. Perhaps this lead to a surge of popularity for new think pieces on the film, posted after the movie's actual release date. (Our webmasters will have to let me know.)

The same thing happened this week when the embargo lifted on Interstellar, which will be released nine days from now and which is already being celebrated as a masterpiece, an Oscar contender, and the single greatest motion picture event since some guy made that movie that one time with the space in it.

No one has seen the film.

Oh, the published critics (and a lot of celebrity tweeters, too) have seen it. I'm not alleging improper journalistic behaviour (ACTUALLY...). But if film criticism has been on a burning cargo plane to hell for at least the better part of the past decade, these last few months have made me think that perhaps, the ride is finally over. Film criticism is dead. May it rest in something resembling relevance.

There are two content strains in writing about film, both of which are generally called film criticism. One is true criticism: that wonderful, spoiler-proof, fully-considered, after-the-fact analysis of what a film is about and how it is about it.

Film criticism is great because it can be written about any film, any time. It isn't beholden to publishing deadlines or hit counts. It presumes (re: that spoiler-proofing) that the reader has seen the film it is describing, and wants to consider some aspect of it more deeply.

Film criticism is the process that the internet nicely democratized. Generally speaking, if you have a blog, and you can spell, and you're not an idiot, you have just as much opportunity as anyone else to add something legitimate and useful to the cluster of context around a filmed work. Good for you.

Film reviewing is the other thing. Film reviews are what used to get published on Fridays in artifacts called "newspapers," written by resident contributors who were fully employed by those newspapers - whose job, can you even imagine it, was to go to the movies and discuss them in writing. Film reviews could be great, even if they couldn't really be criticism; they could pick apart a raft of new releases like a sommelier at a French restaurant, and advise you, the reader, on whether you were likely to get your twelve bucks' worth if you saw any certain film in a theatre.

Film reviewing was also democratized by the internet - but unlike criticism, that democratization process subjected film reviews to a lingering, painful death. It would have been kinder to take film reviewing out behind the toolshed and shoot it twice in the skull; even now, the corpse of the thing remains, animating wildly as the last of its great voices are delegitimized and packaged out. Since the dawn of Ain't It Cool News and its brethren, we've watched film reviewing slowly metamorphose from something that a professional does, to something that anyone with a twitter account can do - and they don't even need to know how to spell, and they certainly don't need to not be an idiot.

The papers started firing their critics, and Entertainment Weekly did that thing, and the content mandates of "online" - i.e. "FIRST!," Klout, and the page-view - rapidly overtook those of published media, even for reputable sites who were the online arm of existing, real-world print media. And so you have things like Interstellar being reviewed on October 27, 2014, nearly two full weeks before anyone purportedly reading the content could possibly see the film.

Again, these are reviews, not criticism, so perhaps the original intent therein - "is the movie good, should I go to see it?" - can be served at a distance just as easily as it can day-and-date. Reviews, whenever they drop, are just another part of the launch and adoption campaign being run by the studios' marketing departments, and their negligible cost on the process must be a source of giddy amusement within those corporate walls even to this day.

I'm writing this on Monday; I don't know how the week will bear out in terms of the continued news cycle on Interstellar. I suspect that by Wednesday, I will have heard from at least a few online sources who, in strident contradiction to the empirical opinion, actually think Instersteller "ain't all that." (There could be some value in launching Ain't All That News, come to think of it.) Thursday morning or thereabouts, there will probably be at least one piece about how Christopher Nolan uses Anne Hathaway and Jessica Chastain's characters in the film, and what that therefore says about a) his hit-and-miss ability to manage female characters; b) female characters in movies, generally; or c) ethics in video game journalism. At some point, these reviews and other online articles feel less like writers speaking to a readership, and more like writers speaking to each other.

The internet is the internet is the internet, and the content pipeline will be greased by professionals, or non-professionals in their stead. But I can't help but see all of this as hastening the demise of the thing, nevertheless. When did film critics, and their respective publications, give up on relevance? Has anyone actually proved that page-views are this valuable? There was a time when readership was built and maintained over long terms - not unlike critics' relationships with readers, audiences, and the movies themselves. Is "someone clicked my link!" really the only success metric we're going after anymore?

Here's some free advice, since this industry apparently really likes "free" now: "FIRST!" is not useful. Useful is useful. Applies to film reviews, comments on web sites, and a whole lot of other things.

Destroy All Monsters is a weekly column on Hollywood and pop culture. Matt Brown is in Toronto and on twitter.