There are few properties more popular, more shareable, more gosh-darn virally exploitable than the Star Wars franchise. So much so that the week of a new release is generally left culturally barren by any competing studios, so as to give it the necessary meme space such a juggernaut craves.
The Last Jedi has been no exception. The chief point has been the endless metaphysical discussion of whether the cute little seal/bird hybrids known as porgs, are a cynical money spinner (the wrong answer) or cute as a CGI button and should be everywhere (correct).
Beyond those, there is a sense among some online critics that they are a scrappy bunch of idealistic upstarts who are up against a cynical, jaded order of establishment media hacks.
Put simply, the internet's response to The Last Jedi, currently the biggest film on this or any other planet, looks stunningly polarised. In a disparity that's pretty near unique, the film has a Rotten Tomatoes score of 93 per cent "fresh" from professional movie reviewers, and a user score of 55 per cent – lower even than any of the much-reviled prequels.
So why has this come to pass? Many have specified the film’s veering from traditional structure, its – ahem – removal of certain characters, its inconsistent tone, and the “diversity” on display in its central cast. What is surprising is that the majority of these complaints weren’t coming from broadsheet critics but self-professed “fanboys”.
Rotten Tomatoes fiasco
The traditional narrative of snooty-nosed pseuds rolling their eyes at popcorn fare is now on its head. Now, a constituency of amateur screen buffs are kicking back at what they see as a lazy and easy-to-please critic’s elite.
There were also numerous people who claimed they actually caused the Rotten Tomatoes fiasco.
"Yes it was me that caused this," claimed the administrator of a Facebook group called "Down with Disney's treatment of franchises and its fanboys", livid with what he sees as Disney's vandalism of Star Wars since it bought Lucasfilm. "They set in motion my ultimate revenge plan . . . Thanks to friends of mine who taught me a thing or two about Bot Accounts, I used them to create this audience score through Facebook Accounts."
Outside of co-ordinated attacks, could this supposedly unprecedented crisis of confidence for a Star Wars middle child be something we've seen before? Most would agree that Empire Strikes Back is the best film of the entire series, but we can scour the web archive to find Vincent Canby's original New York Times review for the film, which he laments it as "bland", "silly" and, more memorably still, "a big, expensive, time-consuming, essentially mechanical operation".
In fairness to him, that film didn’t even have any porgs.
