Identity politics at the centre of bizarre online movie ratings

Looking at the online review score for Captain Marvel one could be forgiven for thinking it’s one of the worst movies ever made. This is despite the fact that it has not released yet and its advance ticket sales are the strongest in the Marvel Comic Universe history, behind only Black Panther and Infinity War.

Digging a little deeper into the reviews reveals the reason for the movie’s already terrible reputation on Rotten Tomatoes’ audience score charts. It all goes back to the moment Captain Marvel star Brie Larson, accepting the final statuette at the Crystal + Lucy Awards, chose to devote her stage time to speak about the lack of representation among film critics.

Speaking about the fact that 63.9% of all movie critics are white males, Larson said: “[Audiences] are not allowed enough chances to read public discourse on these films by the people that the films were made for. I do not need a 40-year-old white dude to tell me what didn’t work for him about ‘[A] Wrinkle in Time.’ It wasn’t made for him. I want to know what it meant to women of colour, to biracial women, to teen women of colour, to teens that are biracial.”

This call for inclusivity appears to have sounded like a clarion call to the alt-right whose members on message boards around the world decided this meant her latest movie needed to be slammed just as they had earlier done with Star Wars: The Last Jedi when that film chose to make two people of colour, Rose Tico (Kelly Marie Tran) and Finn (John Boyega) into heroes.

As reported on Cracked.com though, this review war goes one extra dimension stranger. The site reports that as well as having a hatred of Captain Marvel and Star Wars in common, the reviewers also have a passionate love for the movie Alita: Battle Angel, simply on the basis that it apparently lacks any “identity politics”.

“Any movie that does not push feminist BS is worth seeing and here is my prediction Alita is going to crush Captain Marvel at the box office,” says one five-star reviewer.

“If there was a strong female role model for character-wise, I would say hands down it would have to be Alita versus some [movie] some foul-mouthed self-entitled actress is in [sic],” says another.

It’s a bizarre online war that only the reviewers themselves seem to care about as early predictions suggest Captain Marvel is set to make a massive profit, while Alita inches its way slowly toward recouping its massive $500-million target.

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