Rotten Tomatoes Versus Reality

As a general rule, I’m not a “movie person.” Sure, I can appreciate a good film (“Good Will Hunting” made had me stifling sobs) but you’re more likely to find me binge-watching “Friends” than sitting with my eyes glued to a screen for two hours straight. Especially for old movies where I actually have to pay attention instead of scrolling through my Instagram periodically.

If I’m going to sit through a movie, I need to make sure it’s worth my time. I check “Rotten Tomatoes,” a website dedicated to ranking movies based on critics’ reviews and popular opinion.

Most movies that score 100 percent on Rotten Tomatoes are “beloved classics.” I decided to test the validity of their rating for myself: how do two of these films measure up to the standards of a movie amateur like myself?

All Quiet on the Western Front

I’ll admit I’m a bit of a history buff, especially when it comes to World War I, so I was tentatively optimistic going into “All Quiet on the Western Front“ (1930). As the movie began to play, my hopes were quickly dashed as the screen filled with text: boring! 

Luckily for me, my initial skepticism was proven wrong. Even though I, a girl who charges my iPhone 8 four times a day, can’t possibly know what it’s like to crouch in the trenches under heavy fire in Germany, the actors’ emotions rang true.

I whimpered as Behn ran straight into machine gun fire after being blinded by shrapnel. I burrowed into my couch as soldiers screamed in fear as debris fell in their bunker. I cried alongside Paul as he prayed for his dying comrade’s life. I felt the pain they felt, albeit on a much smaller, far less intense scale.

And somehow the film brought these feelings upon me without the use of gratuitous violence or unnecessary jump scares. The image of two hands clinging to barbed wire, not attached to a body, made me feel a little queasy. However, it was nothing compared to the head-crushing and stomach-impaling that modern audiences have seen in “Game of Thrones” and “The Hunger Games.”

My one major criticism of the movie was that it dragged on for over two hours. The scenes involving the bunker and trench warfare didn’t need to be as old as my grandmother to show the futility of the war – the tears and screams did that on their own. Twenty to 30 minutes could EASILY have been cut out, and the movie would have been essentially the same.

Even so, I would recommend “All Quiet on the Western Front” to anyone, not just the people who watch John Green’s crash course videos for fun. I’m not sure it’s worth 100 percent, but I didn’t even think of scrolling through Instagram.

The Maltese Falcon

Cigarettes and sexism – ah, the ‘40s. “The Maltese Falcon“ (1941) is a film about private investigator Sam Spade and his search to find the long lost Maltese Falcon figurine. A movie about a centuries-old artifact sounds interesting, right? Wrong.

Despite the potential “The Maltese Falcon” had for greatness with it’s star-studded cast – Humphrey Bogart HIMSELF played Sam Spade – and fascinating plotline, the movie fell flat because of it’s unlikeable and outdated characters. Since I didn’t care about the fate of the protagonist, I didn’t care about the story as a whole.

Spade is portrayed as a charismatic private investigator who is constantly praised for his detective work (unworthily) by the people around him – somehow it’s even duller than it sounds.

Spade is dismissive of his intelligent, hard-working secretary’s insights. Then he’s involved in a relationship with his partner’s wife. On top of that, he takes all of his client’s money as a bribe to not turn her into the police. Yet we’re supposed to love him because he’s good at his job and turns the criminals in at the end of the movie – I did not.

I found myself looking down at my phone to check my texts every five minutes. This only exacerbated my problem, because I would wind up rewinding to figure out what I had missed, and it was always worse the second time.

While the film picked up a bit when I was trying to figure out what would happen to Spade and who would end up in possession of the infamous Maltese Falcon, the first hour felt like it was purely exposition, not an actual story.

Perhaps if I had been around in the ‘40s, I would have been swooning over Sam Spade and sitting on the edge of my seat to find out his next move. But as a child of the 21st century with my phone handy at all times, I found Twitter way more interesting than the arrogant Sam Spade.