As regular visitors to the Sci-Fi Gene blog will know, as a rule I have tended to post movie reviews without a score.
This has always been a deliberate decision. I have always felt that giving a movie a score diminishes the review, and indeed the movie, the cinema industry, the general public, Life, The Universe and Everything and by logical extension the reviewer. Can we even assign a meaningful number to a movie? Or a restaurant, a car, a hotel stay, the amount of goals scored by each team in a football game, or the attractiveness of a random stranger? Is this not just the human fashion of attempting to impose order where there is none? Is it meaningful to compare two numbers, for example (and this is plucked purely at random from the many, many possible examples I could have chosen) the speed of a car and the applicable speed limit for that particular stretch of the A127? Do numbers such as the number 5 even mean anything? How do I know that the number I know as 7 doesn't appear to you as the number 25? Would the Universe notice if 3 came after 2 instead of before? How many roads must a man walk down before they call him a man?* And how in seven hells do you use an abacus?
Despite my feelings about the judgemental nature of imposing judgements, and my incredulous near-religious denial of the existence of all numbers between 2.5 and 19, I have nevertheless experimented with number-based scoring systems on a few occasions, incorporating my patent-pending Shark Bonus into certain reviews. The experience left me feeling perplexed, overwhelmed and frankly a little dirty.
However I have come to a realisation. Ethically, a choice not to make a choice is still a choice. By choosing not to score movie reviews, I am in fact assigning a score of unscored. And so, having deduced that avoiding movie scores, like all other aspects of life, is ultimately futile, I have decided to grab the bull by the thorns and turn the adversity of necessity into virtue. I have found a way to fulfil the need for a movie review to be scored, without any of the massive, lethal drawbacks this could otherwise entail. My system is not new or unique to the Sci-Fi Gene - in fact many reviewers on the TripAdvisor website use a similar system.
Henceforth, all movies reviewed on the Sci-Fi Gene blog will be assigned a score out of 5 stars. On all occasions this score will be 3. And on all occasions this score will be entirely justified.
*It's eight.
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