Quantitative Ratings are Really Screwing Up Film Discourse

About six weeks ago I published a post on why I was growing increasingly dissatisfied with Letterboxd. Namely, because of its saturation with one-liner jokes and very little “true” criticism to be found. A conversation I had with Marie-Theres Carl in the comment section of my post has stuck with me since. Particularly, what I keep coming back to is this statement from Marie:

“But now I keep getting asked whether I am on Letterboxd too, and I have been wrestling with that a bit.

Because loving films is more than logging them and attaching a number to them.”

Before she said that, I had subconsciously recognized that perhaps a star rating isn’t the most conducive to nuanced discourse. Nonetheless, it still hadn’t fully registered in my brain until Marie brought it to the surface in our discussion.

A Letterboxd rating is just a number. It can be anywhere from 1-10. That makes ten possibilities for the quality of a film. But can a film truly be reduced to just one of ten options? Maybe that cheesy rom-com and Aftersun are both five-star watches for me. That doesn’t mean that they are equal, though. In fact, they’re quite different despite being granted the same numerical score.

There’s something about the star-rating system that feels strangely attuned to this hyper-digital age we live in. For one, it’s really quick. It doesn’t take long to choose one of ten numbers, especially when you’ve been rating films for a while and have already developed your own personal system. It’s also really short. It just takes me a second or two to see what a friend rated a movie. While I am fully aware that the star rating system existed way before social media, I believe that social media has essentially annexed the star rating to become part of the low-attention-span social media slop.

It’s not that a star rating is inherently careless. It’s more that the star rating is susceptible to modern social media-driven carelessness. It’s so simple and quick to attach a little rating to the movie you just watching. But there are also some people who take it farther. I’ve found some reviewers who have in-depth systems where each of the ten star ratings corresponds do a different level of that enjoyment—a level that they document with an in-depth description of it.

But does that cut it? It’s still quantitative and, more importantly, one-dimensional. Can aftertaste, tone, cinematography, directing, acting, visual effects, story, societal impact, and everything else be politely squeezed into a number? It cannot.

There’s a personal benefit to long-form content because it allows you to think back upon your initial thoughts or reactions. I can see that I rated a film three stars on Letterboxd and that’ll tell me something, but that little something will be pretty inconsequential. On the other hand, even if I just wrote a few sentences talking about how the cinematography really paired well with the themes of the film, I’d remember a lot more about the movie. It’s so satisfying to have this little personal journal of film. Even if it’s just one or two random and separate thoughts, it’s still cool to reminisce on and learn from them.

No matter how hard people try to make the star rating meaningful, it will always be devoid of nuance. While the star rating is quite useful for gauging initial reactions and getting a decent sense of the quality of a film, it will never compare to long-form criticism, reviews, and discourse.

So, get out there and talk to your friends and family about film or maybe even write some reviews. I promise you that your experience will be infinitely more fulfilling and meaningful.

Finally, if you haven’t already, I’d love it if you’d check out this original article that inspired this post!

A Rant Against Letterboxd

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Jul 4

For any new readers whom were guided here by the algorithm, this is not by any means by typical type of post that I make. I almost always write in-depth and thoughtful analyses of films and their themes, whereas this post is frankly me just writing at a wall for a few paragraphs because I have way too many pent-up feelings about Letterboxd. This article…