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‘Kong: Skull Island’ Director Fires a Shot at Negativity-for-Clicks Movie Criticism

John Squires

“I love film criticism and I love reading negative reviews if the author makes compelling and well written arguments.”

You’ve probably noticed that a good deal of internet movie criticism leans heavily on negativity, which seems to get a lot more attention and encourage a whole lot more clicks than positivity these days. Negative film articles and videos get shared all over the internet and rack up the views, while positive ones often fall by the wayside.

If you’re unsure what I mean, just check the numbers on any of those “everything wrong with…” videos that hit YouTube every time a new movie comes out. The videos come courtesy of CinemaSins, and Kong: Skull Island was recently the subject of its own “everything wrong with” video.

Director Jordan Vogt-Roberts doesn’t mind his movie being criticized, but he did take to Twitter today in the wake of the video hitting to address something that very much needs to be addressed about modern film criticism. Too many people on the internet, Vogt-Roberts feels, are just “trolling the art form we love and profiting from it while dumbing the conversation.”

“I just wanted to point out why these videos are infuriating,” Vogt-Roberts tweeted. “They’re often just wrong or think they’re smarter than you. It just makes me sad they get so many views / contribute to the dumbing down of cinema as they syphon other people’s work for their own gain.”

In order to illustrate his gripe with this kind of reductive criticism, Vogt-Roberts highlighted a handful of specific points made about Kong: Skull Island by the CinemaSins video. In doing so, he perfectly showed just how idiotic, misinformed and foolishly nitpicky those types of videos are in their quest to be as negative as possible.

We wanted to share the thread with you because we think it’s a very important one.

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