Culture
28 Nov 14

Movie Opinion: Spoiler Alert - The Critic Fights Back

As another science-fiction blockbuster hits our screens, the inevitable sniping over the film’s perceived lack of scientific merit begins. But movies should be judged on artistic merit, and in doing so we sometimes need to refer to the plot.

October’s release of Interstellar saw a pompous cliché of film criticism raise its tiresome head yet again: the ‘What Interstellar Gets Wrong About Time And Space’ article, with ‘Interstellar’ and ‘Time and Space’ being interchangeable with whatever the reviewer’s area of expert pontification was.

Sometimes these reviews can be useful. For example, if the film is a documentary or based on real people and/or events; or if it addresses social issues like race, sexuality or activism but gets facts or philosophies wrong. But what many people seem to forget is that films are not real. Interstellar deliberately plays with our imagination and thrusts us into a world of indeterminate date, where an apocalypse is soon to occur.
Fox News and their global warming denials aside, if the end of the world was really nigh, you’d think someone would let the rest of us know about it.
These corrective non-reviews miss the point of film criticism – which is to judge a film’s artistry, the director’s vision of a world, and how it’s presented on screen; and opine whether spending some time in these imagined lives will enrich our own.
Which brings me on to film criticism’s more pressing and nettlesome enemy: spoiler complaints.
Spoiler alert: I do not care about spoilers.
Apart from the multiple studies showing that people actually enjoy films more when they know what’s going to happen, there’s the simple issue that film criticism is not marketing.
The best film writing goes deep into the themes of a film, discussing what we can learn from the interactions played out on screen and how the director and actors convey these messages.
This gets more and more difficult to do when any mention of a plot point gets a knee-jerk complaint of “spoiler!” – a label that used to be reserved for the very final resolution of the film but is now being thrust upon any event that happens after the trailers end.
Incidentally, no one complains about trailers spoiling plots or telling you about the film – because trailers are designed to give you information.
So if we can accept the need for trailers to market a film, there needs to be certain level of acceptance of the purpose of film reviews. Critics aren’t there to rehash the titillating mystery of the marketing material but to assess the content – in depth, if needs be.
With 2015 approaching, let us make our cinematic new year’s resolution a simple one; let’s respect the various art forms around film and try to enrich each others’ lives with them, while having great conversations about cinema.
Another spoiler alert: it’s going to be great.