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Last Tuesday the downbeat sci-fi thriller Blindness was released on DVD, and I was startled to learn that on the movie-review site Metacritic I was listed as giving the film a zero score. For those of you unfamilar with Metacritic, it collates reviews of a single movie from various U.S. publications and converts their star ratings to a scale of 0 to 100, which allows the site to supply consumers with an aggregate score (some critics are weighted over others, though the site won’t name names). If the review carries no numerical rating—which is the case for all the Reader capsules found there—then Metacritic assigns a score without consulting the writer. A note asks writers to get in touch if there’s a problem.
A pan to be sure—but can such a review really be converted into a score of zero? How bad would a movie have to be to get an actual zero, no points, nada? A comedy about child rape? (Oh wait, that was Happiness, one of my favorite movies ever.) One hundred minutes of a blank screen? Blindness may have been a failure, but it was certainly a noble one. The capsule expresses admiration for the movie and acknowledges its distinction, while alerting readers that they’re also in for a stone bummer.
