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I think pretty much everyone loves using Rotten Tomatoes to size up a movie, but every once in a while I’ll leave a film wondering how it got such a high score. And I think the problem is: Rotten Tomatoes doesn’t really measure what we think it does.
The site isn’t measuring a movie’s quality so much as it’s measuring whether a movie is mostly good or mostly bad. Because an incredible, best-of-all-time movie gets the same red tomato from each critic as a movie that’s merely palatable. If it’s good enough, it’s red. If it’s not, it’s a green splat.
So an 80 percent rating just says that four out of five people think a movie is good enough. It doesn’t really speak to its quality beyond that. Obviously a really good movie is likely to have…
