Every month, my book club rates the book we’d just read on a 10-point scale. And when a book has a movie version – which, lately, everything seems to – we rate that too, on the same scale.
In May, we discussed Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, which had just been turned into a movie starring Ryan Gosling. I hadn’t seen the film yet. Some of the others had – and I sat there listening to them defend their ratings, the book over the movie, the movie over the book, with the serene confidence of people who had never stopped to ask how they arrived at a number in the first place.
It got me thinking.
For fiction, I have no trouble coming up with my number, because I stole my rating system – wholesale, and without apology – from Aristotle. The Poetics has been doing my homework for 2,400 years. It forces me to grade the parts before I grade the whole: plot, character, thought, diction, action, and spectacle. By the time I get to my final grade, it actually means something. At least to me. (Which, I should be honest, is the only person it has ever needed to mean something to.)
So I wondered whether I could do the same for movies.
Longtime readers know that this is not the first time I have attempted to come up with a “definitive” rating system for movies. But this time, building on what I did before (with limited success), and starting with what I actually look for when the lights go down, this is what I came up with…
The System
You’ll notice the overlaps – a “7” lives in two of the grades at once. In a system this anal, that is unforgivable, so let me forgive myself in advance: Every borderline number goes to the better movie. It’s a generosity I extend to films, and to almost no people.
1 to 4 – DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT. That’s the whole review. Life is short and getting shorter.
5 to 6 – NOT WORTH WATCHING. Subpar in every way that matters – despite whatever it was (a director, a star, a premise) that talked you into the film in the first place. You were promised a meal. You got a photograph of the meal.
6 to 7 – DISAPPOINTING. The plot, the characters, the acting, and the effects were all mostly solid. Solid enough to carry a generic story told in a conventional way, except for one or two elements (a performance, the dialogue, a directing choice) that were so badly off they spoiled the rest. The single rotting board in an otherwise serviceable porch.
7 to 8 – GOOD. Plot, characters, acting, and effects all solid. A generic story, told in a conventional way, enjoyed by you in comfort. Nothing wrong with it. But nothing you’ll remember the next day.
8 to 9 – VERY GOOD. A plot that fully engages. Characters who are believable and true. Visuals that are strong and genuinely add to the experience of watching the thing.
9 to 10 – OUTSTANDINGLY GOOD. Highly intelligent and emotionally true. The film gives you either an honest portrait of a slice of human culture (the horizontal view) or a brave look into the frightening range of a single human soul (the vertical one). And it earns that with a plot that captivates, characters who fascinate, visuals that arrest, and directing and editing so good they make their own labor invisible – which is the hardest trick to pull off.
10 – THE BEST MOVIE YOU EVER SAW. Or near enough. Top five. Top 10. A movie that changed your heart or your mind and didn’t change them back.
There it is.
If you want to argue with me about one of my ratings (perhaps my 8.97 rating of the Spider-Noir series, above?), pick a number, defend it, and pay attention to what it was that you were actually grading – the part you connected with on a personal level. That’s the part the number is always hiding. And it’s the only part worth talking about.
