Dear review bombers: UK, hun?
Like, are you dissatisfied with your lives and thus criticizing strangers’ art to allay your own self-hatred? Or are you just bored during your shift at Burger King? Once you read this, get back to me!
And to the rest of you: Welcome to yet another dissertation about review bombing. I wish we didn’t have to be here today, but alas: Yet another show has fallen prey to the phenomenon. I’m talking about Agatha All Along, which, on the day before its release, had already inspired several one-star reviews without even being out yet. Now, I’m not saying that this was because the show’s stars had recently called it Marvel’s “gayest project yet,” but I’m not not saying that, either. There was just no way that all of those one-star reviewers had already seen the “first four episodes,” as some of them claimed. After all, only critics had earned that privilege to date, and no one else had leaked any footage of the show online. Sure, there were advanced screenings of the show’s first two episodes, but did the entire audience in that theater not only hate the two episodes, but have incentive to write angry reviews about it?
Most likely, they were review bombers. You know review bombing; it has its own Wikipedia page. It’s often spearheaded by straight, white Very Online nerds in baseball caps who have a lot of free time on their social calendars. It also follows a set pattern: [Beloved Franchise Announces Diverse Cast or Content → Review Bombers Rage-Vomit and Complain About It on Telegram or Wherever → Review Bombers Organize and Rally Around a “Narrative” That They Can Spew, Since They Can’t Just Say “We’re Homophobic” → And Finally, Review Bombers Drop a Steaming Pile of One-Star Reviews.]
Honestly, sites like Rotten Tomatoes should have better defenses against these people; they’re moving in the right direction, but they clearly still have work to do. For instance, instead of just asking reviewers to buy a ticket to a movie on Fandango before reviewing it, Rotten Tomatoes should also make sure they’ve seen the movie before reviewing. Also, there’s still no way to test whether people have seen the TV shows they’re bombing, as evidenced by the several people who simply claimed that they’d received embargoed critics’ copies of Agatha All Along.
But before the Internet does more to fight review bombing, it might be helpful to learn a bit more about it. Though it technically began in 2008 when a hoard of angry gamers organized a hate campaign against the video game Spore, the phenomenon effectively went mainstream with the following six incidents.
Look, an audience score can have a real impact on decision-making, especially for someone who knows the difference between “critically-acclaimed” and “entertaining.” (Unfortunately, I learned this distinction far too late in life, after watching the glacial Julia Garner movie The Assistant.) In other words, it helps to know what everyday viewers like, and Rex Reed at The New York Observer is not an everyday viewer.
Thus, the low audience score for Acolyte on Rotten Tomatoes initially turned me off of it before I learned that the score was actually due to a concerted effort by Star Wars fanboys to criticize the show’s inclusion of queerness. They even traveled to Delulu Land, claiming things on YouTube like, “[Lucasfilm] started attacking [us, the fans] before the show even came out; that was to tell you that they knew they had a pile of trash.” Well, this was because those very fans were attacking the show before it even came out, with one-star reviews. Sadly, the rest of the movies and series in this listicle will have similar narratives.
In the case of The Rings of Power, fanboys were not as good at hiding their prejudices. In the weeks leading up to the premiere of the series, which featured a multiracial cast, one-star reviewers claimed that the non-white cast was anti-Tolkien and thus poor storytelling. Airtight argument, there. In the end, Amazon had to shut down its review system entirely.
Episode 3 of The Last of Us, which took a break from the series’ main storyline to focus on an intense same-sex romance, received more than 28% one-star reviews on IMDB after its premiere. Many reviewers just came right out and said that they didn’t like seeing gay folks in their good-ol’, red-blooded American zombie shows.
This was perhaps the most famous case of review bombing in recent history. Basically, Star Wars purists were so angry that newer Star Wars movies had a female lead and black protagonist that they weaponized a bot to spam The Last Jedi with one-star reviews on Rotten Tomatoes. Later, a member of the alt-right took full credit for the stunt.
This was a rare case of a movie being review-bombed for something other than having non-white, non-cis, or non-straight characters in it. Namely, this Oscar Isaac flick about the Armenian genocide during World War I initially suffered a barrage of one-star reviews from a group of Armenian genocide deniers.
We’ll end today’s history lesson with perhaps the most impactful incident of review bombing in recent times: In 2019, even before Captain Marvel came out, sexist ne’er-do-wells had already tanked the movie’s Audience Score on Rotten Tomatoes. Claiming that the movie was “feminist propaganda” which pandered to “social justice warriors,” they spent so much time of their meaningless lives collecting one-star reviews for the movie that they caused Rotten Tomatoes to forever change its Audience Score rating system. This probably wasn’t their intended effect, but the rest of us are still thanking them for it.
And there you have it, folks! Now, go leave a five-star review for Agatha All Along – well, after you watch it. And only if you like it. Let’s be the better people here.
