Passions by some fans of the “The Dark Knight Rises” are getting a little too overheated. A blogger critic Marshall Fine received online death threats on film website Rotten Tomatoes for panning the PG-13-rated release that Warner Bros. will premiere July 20.
Writing for “Time” magazine, Eliana Dockterman said that Fine generated the first negative review from professionals tabulated by Rotten Tomatoes, breaking a streak of 100 out of 100 ratings from film critics. That infuriated some fanboys.
Rotten Tomatoes suspended further comments (after 541 posts were made) with Fine’s review and deleted many posts. When I looked, Rotten Tomatoes presented text, “Sorry review comments have been temporarily disabled for this movie.”
“Several commenters also vowed to destroy Fine’s website and succeeded, in a way, for at least a few hours. A massive influx of traffic crashed the site’s server for a large chunk of the afternoon on Tuesday,” Dockterman wrote.
Comic book and sci-fi fans are passionate and prone to snarky, but threat of personal injury is a bit extreme. Though somewhat disturbing, the threats are probably just over-the-top bluster.
Fine’s review is headlined “Grandiose, not grand” and he says “Dark Knight Rises” is long on atmospherics but short on tension. “At times, the action is so massive and thunderously clunky that I might as well have been watching one of the ‘Transformers’ movies,” Fine wrote (nobody objects to knocking the high-decibel “Transformers” franchise!).
Everybody is entitled to their opinion. Some critics no doubt intentionally go against the grain simply to get noticed.
“The Dark Knight Rises” is getting excellent review from top critics like Roger Ebert (“builds to a sensational climax”) and Joe Morgenstern (“spectacular [and] remarkable for its all-encompassing gloom”).
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