After the embargo lifted today, the Rotten Tomatoes score for DC’s new superhero melange Justice League is out in the ether. The good news? It scores way more than 0%. The bad news? The figure is far from 100%, either. In fact, the percentage – an average from a bunch of different reviews – is equidistant between the two… minus 10%. Yep, the Justice League scores a precarious 40% on Rotten Tomatoes. Cue the DC fanboy meltdown.
Justice League’s Rotten Tomatoes Score
While Justice League garnered positive takes from CNN’s Brian Lowry and Michael O’Sullivan of the Washington Post, fellow critics Joe Morgenstern (Wall Street Journal) and Peter Travers (Rolling Stone) hammered the first collective appearance of the Super Friends.
Morgenstern took the following broad swipe:
“Justice League is a crowd-pleaser only if you’re part of a comics-obsessed crowd.”
While Travers considered the film too light in tone for his taste:
“[T]he film takes so many happy pills it almost overdoses on them. Sometimes shadows need to fall to show us what to be scared of.”
Even the most scathing reviews, though, hailed Ezra Miller’s performance as Flash.
The Subjectivity of Reviews
Now, it’s time for our usual reminder that opinions on art media – whether it’s film, TV, comics/graphic novels, or games – are inherently subjective. Imagine two people with diametrically opposed views on a piece of media: you love a piece, but your friend hates it. You know what’s so great about that? You’re both right!
Objective analysis on art is impossible. A person can only observe – and judge – art from their own perspective, and their subjective opinion is only ever able to represent themselves alone. As such, it’s worth noting that, since subjective opinions on art only represent the person who presents it, there is no hierarchy of opinion; the views of a critic and a layman are weighted equally. So, own your opinion and don’t let the dissent/praise of others impede how you feel about art; love or hate, safe in the knowledge that your taste is your own. Remember that and play nice, kids.
