Day 19 - Outbreak

So I was adding all of the Kevin Spacey movies on Netflix instant watch to my queue the other day, and today I wound up watching this one. He doesn't star in it, but Dustin Hoffman does. So I'm not complaining.

Outbreak is a thrilling film about (you guessed it) an outbreak of a new highly lethal and contagious virus. It's scary.

The plot is fairly simple so I won't go into that too much. The best acting in the film is probably Morgan Freeman's, as unfortunately Dustin Hoffman's and Kevin Spacey's characters were too static to do much with.

With that said (and that's mostly all there is to say, as Outbreak is fairly simple), I'd like to go off on a little tangent. It has to do with the fact that this movie has a 59% on Rotten Tomatoes and how little I care about that.

My view is that movies (the ones we see, at least) are inherently good, for one reason or another. The folks who spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours to create movies wouldn't do so if they didn't think they had something good on their hands. As such, the bad ones tend to get sifted out and aren't made. But this poses a problem to the consumer. If every movie is good, how do we know which to see? I doubt there is anyone who sees every movie that hits box offices, and many see very few at all. Thus, people need a mechanism by which to make decisions about which movie they should spend their twelve dollars on. Therein lies our demand for critics.

Film criticism is very easily accessible (handy sites have even developed ranking systems created from scores of critic reviews) and so, for simplicity's sake, people have come to rely on them. Yet, with so many critics out there, the consumers who'd like to read actual reviews have come to prefer critics who provide a greater spark to their reviews. After all, everything (even reviews of entertainment) is entertainment. This has given credence to more critical critics and, as such, this has become the norm. Because of this, every movie that isn't the Mona Lisa on film is regarded as sub-par. For the sake of not beginning to rant, I'll end my tangent right about here.

I can't help but feel that we're moving in the wrong direction here. I have no means of uprooting societal tendencies like these, but what I can do is present a view of the films Hollywood spits out as they are: inherently good.