Destroy All Monsters: Do You Rate Films From The Bottom Up, Or The Top Down?

For a long time, I didn't believe in star ratings for movies. To an extent, I still don't - there's no calculation for how much I enjoyed a thing, let alone one that can capture that enjoyment in a permanent relationship to everything else I've ever enjoyed.

(And even if there were: what would I do if a movie ever blew past the existing top of the scale? And why wouldn't I always be looking for that to happen, anyway?)

Then I became a user of Letterboxd, and I got backed into using star ratings in spite of myself. I was being somewhat of a twerp about it: I didn't particularly want to use my Letterboxd diary as anything other than an opportunity to write cheap, usually one-line, quips about the movies I was watching; but in the interests of fairness, I figured I could also use the out-of-five star ratings as an easy barometer for my friends on how much I'd actually liked the movie I was logging.

It's still not, and should not be taken as, anything more sophisticated than a quick impression of a film-watching experience. Letterboxd stars are a palette with exactly three more colours on it than Siskel & Ebert's patented (no, I mean literally trademarked) thumbs up/thumbs down model.

Taken beyond impressionism, numerical ratings for movies and any other art form quickly lead us down a rathole from which shall emerge nothing more or less than the death of film criticism itself. But that's a subject for another time.

What I'm more interested in today is this: if you use ratings for the movies you watch, how do you approach them? From the bottom up, or the top down?

See, the simple (and somewhat abhorrent, if I'm being honest) truth on my end is that adopting the Letterboxd model had an impact on the way I process the movies I watch, which I'm still sorting through. Thinking in terms of stars and numbers can't help but impose a structure on my considerations of a movie's merits.

I'm pretty anti-structural when it comes to film-watching, generally speaking (hadn't you noticed?). I've seen people on Letterboxd and elsewhere who can dissect the movie-watching experience to such an extent that they can hand out an out-of-100 score to a film based on five-point increments for each category of filmcraft (cinematography, editing, costume design, etc.) as though they were totting up the votes for the Academy Awards.

Aside from being way more work than I ever want to do in my life, that approach is also a fairly freaky way to do things as a film critic; as though a movie were a machine into which we could plug a diagnostic app and run a troubleshooting series that would spit out the health of each component part, completely ignoring the degree to which any movie, from the most personal to the most programmatic, is a wild, idiosyncratic work of art.

Speaking of wild idiosyncrasy, I bet you're wondering why this column is topped with a picture of Thor firing an Uzi.

That's who that is, by the way. Thor. With an Uzi. The frame is from a SyFy mockbuster that emerged in 2011 when Thor was in theatres called Almighty Thor, and it's terrible. (One star out of five!)

But watching the film over the weekend pushed the question that started this column into the top of my mind.

See, my neural rewiring at the hands of Letterboxd.com made me notice and appreciate the fact that for the most part, I watch movies with what could (immodestly) be called a "generous" frame of mind. Every movie most movies I watch, I watch with an open mind and an expectation that I am going to enjoy myself.

In the star-rating model, in other words, I am basically giving a movie five out of five on credit, and then adjusting my review downwards after the fact if necessary, based on what I actually see. Or to put it in terms everyone can understand, every movie gets the chance to be Mad Max: Fury Road; some movies end up as Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome.

I'll admit, though, that in some cases (and quite naturally, I'm sure), I'm basically starting at zero and working my way up.

Almighty Thor was definitely a zero-star expectation and a zero-star experience for the majority (Richard Grieco as Loki, y'all).

But in the third act, I had to admit that Thor firing an Uzi was worth at least one star out of five.

This happens a lot, particularly when I'm watching shitty movies; if they do anything well at all, my brain will nearly involuntarily say "well, that's worth a star," or "Total Recall remake, half a star per boob" or something. It's all about as serious as my star ratings were in the first place, but this notion of applying or deducting credit intrigues me.

I'm sure in a perfect Buddhist universe neither schematic would apply and one would simply encounter a film, have a wholly invested experience, and walk away without having to give the film a report card like a delinquent schoolchild, let alone work out how such merit is to be earned within the syllabus.

But in the meantime, I'm interested in how you watch the movies you watch, so feel free to sound off in the comments below.

Given that we all eventually land on scaled qualifiers for the movies we experience (even "it was okay" and "it sucked" are scaled qualifiers), how do you approach your film reactions? Is every film an A student till it fails? How hard does a movie have to work to earn your thumbs-up? Do you start from the bottom, or work down from the top?

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