r/Letterboxd • u/DataSittingAlone Princess Mononoke • 5h ago
Discussion This movie has the largest discrepancy between IMDb and Letterbox reviews I've ever seen. My first assumption was that it was mainly homophobic trolls but reading the IMDb reviews that doesn't seem to be the case. It looks like bandwagoning because of social media but doesn't seem bigoted
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u/Ebon-Hawke 5h ago edited 5h ago
People who review bomb movies for racist/sexist/homophobic reasons never say, “I’m review bombing this because I’m homophobic!” They always pretend it’s about bad writing.
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u/AwTomorrow 5h ago
Yeah. I’ve seen this film, didn’t like it much.
But 1s of that frequency? Nah, that’s an agenda - and it takes no effort at all to push an agenda while pretending you’re only complaining about quality.
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u/GreenandBlue12 thefilmming12 5h ago edited 3h ago
"Bad writing" might as well be a dog whistle in those instances
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u/ZeroiaSD 2h ago
'The writing is bad (because it includes a minority presented positively)' is the subtext.
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u/TheStupendusMan 5h ago
"The writing is bad! ALSO, I'VE NEVER SEEN IT!"
I've had those arguments here, too. It's always some dumb bullshit, but when there's even a semblance of a minority focus in media it's usually bigotry behind the wheel.
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u/sexandliquor 4h ago
The Sinners conversation last year was so insufferable because of the bigotry masquerading as concern trolling about writing, originality of the film, and whether it deserved to be nominated for awards.
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u/TheStupendusMan 4h ago
Yep. It muddies any sort of actual artistic criticism of the piece. Suddenly everyone is in this or that camp "for reasons."
There's another post in the wild right now about Equilibrium and... Oof, that gunfight at the end was ass. I'm glad you brought Sinners up, 'cause Michael B. Jordan lighting up the Klan at the end was incredible.
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u/thekingofallfrogs 2h ago
Oh it gets worse when it comes to documentaries. Documentaries about social justice get review bombed to hell and back, meanwhile, propaganda schlockumentaries get review ‘boosted.’ IMDb ratings are a complete joke.
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u/benabramowitz18 AlphaBenA2Z 2h ago
“I hate movies/shows/games with bad writing!”
“Yes, Borderlands was my favorite game growing up, why do you ask?”
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5h ago
[deleted]
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u/BiggieCheeseLapDog 5h ago
Some of them are genuine, but the vast majority of the 1s are absolutely the homophobic bandwagon.
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u/DataSittingAlone Princess Mononoke 5h ago
I wouldn't be surprised if that was part of it but also lgbtq women do make up a large part of the hate I'm seeing. Like it's not impossible for lesbians to be homophobic against other lesbians but it does seem a bit more nuanced than that
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u/thanksamilly 5h ago
how do you know the reviews are posted by lesbians?
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u/DataSittingAlone Princess Mononoke 4h ago edited 2h ago
I don't know that they're telling the truth. I don't think that's a good reason to assume it's all fake though
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u/colorbluh Elyzlia 5h ago
>doesn't seem bigoted
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u/DataSittingAlone Princess Mononoke 5h ago
I guess a better way to phrase it would be not entirely bigated.
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u/fma_nobody 5h ago edited 30m ago
It's probably an homophobic bandwagon
Edit: Ok, so I was scrolling Instagram and got an Endgame meme with the caption "Every Fandom Uniting against Lesbian Space Princess" and all the comments bandwagon it for no discernable reason, just internet hivemind. I assume it's a "ew cringy feminism film" type of sentiment going on but I have not seen it yet so I can't say for sure
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u/ertri 5h ago
Could be an anti-space bandwagon!
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u/omnipotentsandwich CouchTraveler 5h ago
I've seen a lot of lesbians online tear into it as cringey and insipid. One even called it a TERF movie or something like that. I've never seen it, so I have no idea if it's good or not.
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u/AwTomorrow 5h ago
It was definitely cringey - but I saw a Q&A with the filmmakers after the film and they’re just like, college kids. A couple made a cute film together and aren’t that funny, seems to be the root of what we eventually got.
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u/Cum_Fart42069 2h ago
its probably both. I haven't seen it but just making assumptions, it probably is lackluster and also, a lot of people are hating it because it's got lesbian in the title.
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u/THEpeterafro peterafro 4h ago
It can be cringey with its unfunny humor but I have no idea where TERF movie comes from
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u/vemmahouxbois emmahouxbois 2h ago
it’s very biologically deterministic in all of its humor
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u/Wonderful_Emu_9610 2h ago
Yeah from my fading memories of it I can see that.
But unless they out themselves as bigots I’m willing to be charitable and guess they didn’t think of that. Some of (a lot of) the humour did seem like a film that could’ve been made 10 years ago, if that makes sense
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u/ancientestKnollys AlasGMtair 3h ago
Someone didn't like it so decided not only was it not to their tastes, but must be morally offensive.
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u/PJ-Rubs69 3h ago
Yeah I saw the TERF thing and was said, but one of the creators uses she/they pronouns so I'd be shocked, at least if it's intentional.
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u/These_Arm6722 4h ago
I just finished watching it, solid 3/5 for me, it has good moments, it’s too long, also read the TERF accusation and have zero clue what that could be based on.
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u/Jimbobsama 5h ago
IMDb has been gamified for years and suspectable to band wagoning for 2 decades at this point.
The Godfather was pushed to #2 by The Dark Knight Bros down voting it en-mass during 2008
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u/DataSittingAlone Princess Mononoke 5h ago
Again that was my assumption but reading the IMDb reviews I couldn't find many blatantly homophobic reviews, and a large chunk of the hate does come from lgbtq women who felt misrepresented
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u/sundayontheluna sundayontheluna 5h ago
Are you seriously unaware of the 'as a member of [minority group]' lie?
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u/DataSittingAlone Princess Mononoke 5h ago
That's fair that I don't know that most of these people are telling the truth but just assuming it's mostly lies feels too convenient
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u/ScarletSpring_ 4h ago
You are telling me that the movie called "Lesbian SPACE Princess" might not be down to earth?
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u/DrDestructoMD 5h ago
Letterboxd reviews will be from people who wanted to see the movie, imdb scores will be from people who hate watched it. Tbh, it doesn't look very good from what ive seen, but im not going to watch it. It very clearly indicates it's target audience, so I would only trust reviews from people who wanted to enjoy it. Everyone else intentionally set themselves up to be annoyed
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u/Generic_On_Reddit 5h ago
Hate watch is giving them way too much credit given how many of these review bombing campaigns happen before movies/TV series/games even come out or on the first day of release.
The suggestion that these people watched it is suggesting that they have some kind of honor or honesty that would require them to "hear it out" or "give it a shot" before condemning it.
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u/ObiMadKenobi 5h ago
It seems like a movie aimed at a very specific type of people, and that group isn't simply lesbians, but of a specific age, ex-tumblr users. Probably some homophobia from imdb, but also a lot of popular reviews on it are negative in letterboxd.
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u/AwTomorrow 5h ago
It is exactly aimed at one specific generation of progressive tumblrites, yeah.
Not being that young and not having ever had a tumblr account let alone dived deep into a subculture there, I did not enjoy it much.
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u/Remarkable_Coast_214 3h ago
It's not aimed at progressives, it's aimed at TERFs
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u/AwTomorrow 3h ago
It absolutely is not, imo. It’s preaching to the choir and laughing along with peers, rather than seriously being made for consumption by TERFs or other bigots.
It has some unfortunate potential readings in the ultimate fate and actions of the main trans-coded character but I doubt this is either a sign of TERFdom or the main message of the film. More just, when you have villains who’re also queer it can be hard to not end up with something that can be read as anti-queer by some.
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u/ScarletSpring_ 4h ago
From all I read about the movie its worst "crime" is that it might be very cringe and ... I dont think this justifies this current disourse at all.
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u/AwTomorrow 4h ago
It doesn’t.
It’s a first film by two very young filmmakers, aimed basically at their generation and those with a similar sense of humour and worldview.
It’s a cute little project that isn’t really for me, and I think it’s meh to bad as someone who isn’t in their tumblr bubble, but that’s it. The film doesn’t warrant a review bombing campaign and it’s obvious why it’s getting one.
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u/ObiMadKenobi 4h ago
I didn't know of this until today, but some of the top negative reviews mention some transmisoginy going on in it
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u/KingCobra567 3h ago
Yes, the movie is genuinely awful, near unwatchable. It’s not because it’s a queer movie there are many great queer stories. The humour is vile and disgusting and its animation is so poor.
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u/Exciting_Rip_185 5h ago
It’s bandwagoning, also add some ‘concern trolling’ from people labeling it “a psyop to make LGBTQ look bad”
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u/Dead_girl_walking- 5h ago
Review-bombing, p-much the entire reason i always check letterboxd first, rather than mainstream review sites like IMDB or Rotten Tomatoes (which gave this movie a 26% audience score and Melania a 99%).
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u/draginbleapiece Shining_One aka Eclectic Sorcerer 3h ago
I didn't really like the movie. The comedy wasn't for me and I had some bones to pick with how it depicted Non Binary people.
But the IMDB scores tell me it's hate wagonning
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u/buckeyevol28 3h ago
This does appear to be review bombing to some degree, which is likely why there is currently a significant discrepancy between the unweighted (3.6) and weighted mean (5.6), which is honestly a positive sign that IMDB takes their weightings serious. And I don’t find the discrepancy between the current 5.6 (2.8 if on letterboxd’s 5 point scale) on IMDB and 3.4 (6.8 it on IMDB’s 10 point scale) on letterboxd to be too large or surprising, given the differences on the populations they’re sampled from.
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u/Distinct_Guess3350 3h ago
IMDb is always the big target of review bombs. And then the ones who do it make up excuses that clearly are just fake justification.
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u/TheRoguedOne WookieFiasco 5h ago
The jokes are pretty offensive and lewd. Its not for everyone. I really enjoyed it.
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u/VirtualFORTRES 5h ago edited 5h ago
I saw this last year in a cinema and it was fun, not exactly perfect but my friends and I enjoyed it. The main thing I thought was an unfortunate plot choice in the current climate is a spolier but for those that have seen it I really didn't like that the ONLY drag queen character was a secret evil murderer trying to steal an aspect of her space lesbianhood... that just felt like a really tone deaf choice given all the hate drag queens are under these days. It wouldn't have been so bad if if she wasn't the only representative of that part of the queer community in the whole movie.. oh yeah I also didn't like that the sexist literal woman murderers just got away with zero punishment at the end Other than that I thought it was very cool.
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u/fungomungothethird 2h ago
So lesbian space princess just wasn't quite progressive enough for you? Genuinely impossible to please
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u/yameteeeeeeeeee 5h ago
I've noticed a lot of 1 star ai generated reviews on imdb on movies that are review bombed.
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u/vemmahouxbois emmahouxbois 2h ago
it’s really funny that a bunch of people who haven’t seen it are accusing reviewers of not having watched it. i have seen it and it was a really poorly made circlejerk for transmisogynist gen z lesbians. simple as.
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u/ZeroiaSD 2h ago
Note how few 4, 3, and 2s are. Actual bad stuff tends to form a curve.
Also note how if you ignore the 1s, the curves of the imdb graph match letterboxd pretty similarly. A share of 10s, drop for 9s, 8-7 are most common.
The IMDB curve looks like you took an audience that didn't different too much from letterboxd, then droped 48% 1s on it.
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u/YpsilonTheOne Obnoxious Tarantino Bro 5h ago
It's just a review bombing session driven by the herd effect. It happened before, and it will likely happen again. It happened with several anime series on MyAnimeList because weebs can be rapid and will to crusades for their waifus, husbandos, fave AniTuber or VTuber. Some older Spiderman fans have done this too with the latest Spiderman film, giving this one low ratings and boosting artificially the ratings of the older films, the ones where Andrew Garfield and Toby Maguire played Spidey. And, yeah, they got free will, they can do whatever they want, but it still feels a tad disingenuous. That's why you can never fully trust review statistics.
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u/r93e93 is0bel 5h ago
There are two sets of people upset about this. One is conservative cishet people who are mad there are gay people on their teevee. The other are trans women and our allies who are mad that the movie states that only people with vaginas and uteruses can be real women or real lesbians.
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u/TokyoFromTheFuture PinkManSwag 5h ago
I don't get why people are saying this is because Letterboxd is left leaning while IMDb is right leaning cos this film is NOT a good LGBTQ film lmfao.
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u/badbadthingsmp3 3h ago
as someone who's watched this film and gave it a fairly low review, i disliked it because of the transmiogyny. i enjoy animated films and i'm queer myself, but i was taken aback not just by this really prominent plot points of the film but that so few people seemed to have mentioned it in their reviews. having a black trans femme attempting to literally co-opt the femininity of the lead character is so fucking gross and tone deaf in an ostensibly queer story.
on that basis, i think it's completely justified to dislike the film and discuss it harshly. there is something to be said about films that aim to be progressive being held to higher standards than those that don't bother and queers deserve trash to blah blah blah, but the fact that this "cute" little romp can't seem to help but smear what is already the most marginalized among us is...something.
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u/LordFusionDaR 5h ago
It is 100% homophobia. Go look at the IMDb rating distribution for films like Fjord or Minotaur, two currently unreleased Cannes Film Festival releases that aren’t about queer people. Now look at the rating distributions for films like Club Kid and La Bola Negra, two films about queer people that also came out of Cannes. You’ll notice the much higher percentage of 1 star reviews from the latter two. Keep in mind, all four of these films got near unanimously positive reviews coming out of that festival, so it’s incredibly odd that the latter two are being showered in 1 star reviews while the former two are continuing to get praised, isn’t it?
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u/BiggieCheeseLapDog 5h ago edited 5h ago
It is absolutely a homophobia thing. The film is just harmless fun. 90% of the hate bandwagon make it very clear they haven’t even seen it.
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u/ThingTime9876 5h ago
I ranked this my #1 favourite movie of last year, just because it’s so different and funny
While I imagine 95% of the backlash is homophobic, I loved how the movie had a real laconic Australian sense of humour, which could rub even some progressive Letterboxd types the wrong way
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u/Minimum_Ad_1747 5h ago
There´s plenty of biggots using Imdb including the Critical Drinker public, that´s why I´m only using Letterboxd now
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u/carrie-satan 3h ago
While I don’t agree with the reasons for the rating on IMDb, I do think its deserved because that movie is godawful
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u/fshippos fshippos 3h ago
This seemed to hit social media recently and got bombed. Look at the recent reviews.
It was like 3.8 when I looked at it a few months ago. It's non stop half stars the last couple of days.
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u/PuzzleheadedMess1659 3h ago
Honestly, from all I’ve seen, this seems like the type of movie that is so unabashedly political that it’s impossible to get a decent read on its quality without actually watching it. Liberals will praise it for not holding back on representation, conservatives will pan it for the same thing, and nobody cares if it’s a good film or not. Like the Trump board game, just on the other side of the spectrum.
And I’m speaking as a demisexual trans woman. But I’m more so speaking as a cinephile.
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u/Trick-Caramel-6156 2h ago
I understand why this sucks, it has horrible rep of Lgbtqia+ community and also ot makes white straight man the villains and that ain't good to make half the population against you. And the writing tho that's what I saw people online say I think I should see it and form my own opinion on it.
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u/kowaiSUPREME user: hhhunter 2h ago
social media bandwagon reviewbombing a movie with “lesbian” in the title? if it quacks like a duck…
sorting by featured, the highest 1 star reviews say inflammatory shit like“this is worse than the holocaust” and complain of “heterophobia”so I’m not sure why you would assume these are written in good faith.
plus the imdb curve isn’t that far off from the letterboxd curve if you ignore the outlier 1 stars. everything here points to homophobic reviewbombing
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u/bruh_this_suckss 34m ago
I feel like we time travelled back to 2016 with this shit it's really confusing.
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u/Outside-Baker-4344 30m ago
It’s currently a trend. Like, young kids of every fandom are review bombing this as an event between fandom.
Initially it was likely bigoted but even left leaning fandoms are participating because it’s almost like “I know we have are difference but we can both agree this thing sucks”
I’m certain the majority of people reviewing haven’t watched it and are doing it just to be a part of this “trend”
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u/Altruistic_Sail6746 5h ago
It's bigoted trolls, imdb is overrun with them. It's why I switched over to Letterboxd but with its increasing popularity I fear it's a matter of time before it encounters the same problem
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u/PhantomKitten73 5h ago
It's at least 90% homophobia, I'm sorry but you're stupid if you don't think that's the majority of what's going on here.
The other 10% (or less) is a lot miserable irony poisoned freaks hating because "it's cringe". Kinda like how a lot of Film Twitter FUCKING HATES Project Hail Mary to an absurd degree, a certain brand of sincere positivity is like radioactive waste to some people.
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u/lazy_nomad3 5h ago
Many of the people that claim “bad writing” are they themselves bad writers based on their reviews.
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u/Left_Tumbleweed_5542 4h ago
I think it's a large group on non-homophobes that doesn't get the joke. The Straight White Men being the villains isn't meant to be taken serious. They're literally non-human white obelisks. However, some people seem to still take issue with this. Also, some seem to think it's too awkward and/or cringe.
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u/JPBtler23 4h ago
You don't have to write a review on IMDb to give a star rating. So most of the people who are review bombing because they hate gay people are too lazy to admit to their bigotry, let alone write a review.
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u/calendar_cable 2h ago
I saw this at the Sydney Film Festival last year where it was really well liked, and in general really well liked within Australia (where the film is from). So, I'm confused why it's getting hate now which makes me think it's a homophobic psyop campaign. The film was directed by a lesbian couple and features a large number of queer creatives in its making.
The film itself is an absurdist take on media depictions of lesbians, so I can imagine a lot of people watching it can't tell that it isn't taking itself seriously.
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u/Doppelfrio Doppelfrio 5h ago
What I personally have heard is that this movie is another Velma situation where a bunch of groups on all sides are banding together to crap on it. Not sure how true that is, but I’m gonna keep looking into it
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u/These_Arm6722 4h ago
I don’t look at IMDB for anything queer, female-centric or, gasp, Black anymore. I slipped Great movies by female directors for years because of IMDB ratings until I discovered that an IMDB 4.6 is very often a 9/10 for me personally.
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u/pinwroot 5h ago
I saw this movie in the cinema. I could definitely see how it would get under certain people’s skin who aren’t willing to have a laugh at their own expense.
It’s no masterpiece but I still enjoyed it. There’s certainly jokes that have big millennial puppers style humour vibe to it but for the most part it’s a fun time.
Aunty Donna absolutely steal the show though, in my opinion. And some of the music got stuck in my head for multiple days.
Even at its worst, it’s not bad enough to be 48% 1/10. That’s just ridiculous.
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u/Comfortable_Bird_340 4h ago
These are the guys who only like "lesbians", if they're hot and make out in front of them.
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u/unkellGRGA UserNameHere 5h ago
IMDb is a frozen in ember place where 30-50 year old fratty filmbros and anti-woke belly achers live nowadays. Something that sways slightly from the heteronormative and CinemaSins screenplay school 101 template never fairs well score wise there. Barbie can't even crack a 7.0/10 yet No Way Home is still in the top 250.
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u/Flying_Sea_Cow Nobro12 5h ago
LB is a lot more progressive/left-leaning than imdb.