First Inkling
Like other film goers of the Boomer generation, I cut my movie-going teeth on adventure films like the Star Wars trilogy and (especially) Indiana Jones. Though they basically contain B-movie plots given A-list treatments, their over-the-top audacity and sheer enthusiasm made up for any shortcomings in probability or plot construction.
When Disney announced the premiere of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (IJ5), I welcomed the fan reviews despite rumors of rewrites, production delays, and on-set ego conflicts. After all, what business endeavor, particularly an artistic ones, doesn’t have its share of creative differences?
However, the overwhelming negativity of many reviews, particularly those appearing on YouTube, surprised me. Titles like “How Could Indy Flop This Badly?” and “Indiana Jones Is a Total Disaster for Disney” hyperbolized the film’s failure while providing little basis for their declarations. Many reviewers’ analyses seemed totally specious. Some ascribed the movie’s failure to Phoebe Waller-Bridge‘s inadequate performance. Others blamed Harrison Ford as being too old for playing the role. A few perceived deeper, managerial forces at work which forced director James Mangold to reshoot scenes and alternative endings for various audiences.
Due Diligence
None of these criticisms made a lot of sense to me. If the film was this bad, mainstream media critics would roast it as well. However, most assessments tended to resemble the one provided by Inverse‘s Alex Welch which concluded the film “offers a surprisingly nuanced take on the power and utility of nostalgia.”
Reserving our judgments on that evaluation alone, my wife and I attended a Monday matinee performance and were enthralled the entire 142 minutes of run time. We left the theater shaking our heads. What gives?
Common Assessment
At first glance, It appears many of the film’s most negative critics have their own political and social axes to grind. Some, like Midnight’s Edge, berate Disney films in general for imposing a “forced diversity” component upon the audience. Others, like Ryan Kinel, creator of RK Outpost, go further, blasting Disney films for promoting what they consider “sjw (social justice warrior)/woke content.”
All of this type of negativity John Mangold and Quora commentator, Chris Walters, dismiss as part of a growing yet grudging fandom menace. Walters encapsulates the group’s feelings this way, “many who are unhappy with anything after the original three [Star Wars] movies, they don’t like Lucas tinkering with the original three movies. They don’t like the three prequel movies, although some of the dialog and Jar Jar Binks are terrible. And they definitely don’t like the three movies that Disney released to finish the Skywalker saga.”
Could It Be Something Else?
But is this “fandom menace” comfined to Disney alone? Or is it more widespread and insidious? Finding reliable sources disscussing this topic is difficult. However, in one critical response toward The Last Jedi, researcher Morten Bay declared the backlash to that film should be regarded with more than a grain of salt. His study, “Weaponizing the Haters,” discovered 50.9 % of the negative reviews were “politically motivated or not even human.” In actuality, these fan base disagreements are “deliberate, organized political influence measures in disguise.” Their purpose–“increasing media coverage of the fandom conflict, thereby adding to and further propagating a narrative of widespread discord and dysfunction in American society.”
Unfortunately, Morten is not so precise as to identify or give the number of Russian websites involved in such trolling activities. He also dismisses the total involvement by these trolls to no more than 21 per cent of the total online discussion. Still, provoking such dust-ups and amplifying discord through local and national media offers a tremendous return on sowing doubt and cultural uncertainty.
Conclusion
Given the rate of return, trolling a cultural icon like Disney by criticizing the movies they produce seems like a soft power weapon whose use is difficult to resist. As Vitaly Bespalov, a former operative for the St. Petersburg troll farm says, “Putin doesn’t see any conflict in such operations. He sees trolling of any kind as ‘an equivalent step to the so-called ‘negative actions’ that the West is doing against Russia.” Regarding the West’s reaction, he concludes “I think they are not used to these black games. They are more naive.”
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