Man, Some People REALLY Do Not Understand the Concept of Overrated
I am not a fan of the word or the concept overrated. It’s always struck me as inherently self-regarding and smug, a way to tell the world that it’s wrong and you’re right and aren’t afraid to boldly assert your correctness.
For me, overrated is a cheap, easy ticket to negativity and smug judgment. But it’s also narcissistic in the way that it posits an individual opinion as being so inherently important that it must be shared with the world and used as a weapon against the institutionalized evil of a wrong and bogus critical consensus.
The concept of overrated is also tragically boring. Saying that Gone With the Wind is an overrated, bloated, racist and sexist mess is just as tedious as hailing it as the unassailable apogee of the Studio System. I happen to believe one of those sentiments and not the other but thinking that Gone with the Wind is overrated and bad doesn’t make that opinion particularly interesting or compelling.
Saying that something beloved is overrated is generally just as much of a cliche as saying that something traditionally considered great is just as wonderful as its reputation suggests.
Even when used correctly, “overrated” irritates me but it irritates me even more when it’s used incorrectly. That happens ALL the time, particularly on the internet, which runs on hate, ego and sour judgment, the ugly, harsh emotions that fuel the concept of “overrated.”
I groan inside when someone in a Facebook or Reddit group asks what movies, television shows, celebrities and books other people think are mind-bogglingly amazing and life-changing in every conceivable positive way are actually total shit only jackasses enjoy.
Do we really need another excuse for negativity, fighting, tension, ugliness and sour judgment on the internet? Isn’t it overflowing with toxicity as it is?
I strongly dislike the concept of overrated when used correctly. But I fucking HATE it when the word is used in such an egregiously wrong fashion that it renders it meaningless.
This happens all the time online, particularly in reader-generated lists. To cite a representative example, I Googled “Ranker” and “Overrated movies” and came upon a list that explicitly states that, in order to appear to qualify, a movie should have received “some critical acclaim” and also “have a Metacritic score of 50 or more.”
That’s setting the bar awfully low, as a Metacritic score of 50 is the very definition of average, not a particularly good score. The introduction is actually considerate enough to give us a deeply inaccurate definition of overrated when it explains, “Being overrated doesn't mean it's not a good movie, or even a classic movie, it just means the movie's not living up to the hype surrounding it.”
That is NOT what overrated means! If a movie’s not living up to the hype surrounding it then it is OVER-HYPED , NOT OVERRATED. Hyped is even in the fucking wrong definition.
If something is overrated on a historic scale, to the point where it belongs on a list of the most overrated films of all time it should be highly rated. As Ranker puts it, “These are movies that film critics hailed as brilliant, movies your friends said you had to see, comedies you would fall over laughing at, and dramas so deep you'd never look at the world the same way again.”
Yet the list nevertheless is topped by The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn-Part 2. I could be wrong, but I distinctly remember the second entry in the Break Dawn saga NOT being hailed by critics as brilliant, the masses as something everyone had to see and a drama so deep it made audiences see the world in a new light. On the contrary, I recall it being universally mocked for sucking, just like the next film on the list, Twilight.
The top ten is confusing being it includes both films that qualify as potentially overrated by virtue of being rated highly at the time of their release, like Avatar, La La Land, Dreamgirls and Shakespeare in Love with crap like Snow White and the Huntsman, Paranormal Activity 2 and The Fate of the Furious. The 2016 Ghostbusters also made the list because people hate women, particularly when they defy the natural law of nature and bust ghosts. Ghost-busting is an inherently male endeavor. It just plain makes men feel good. Women should stick to shoe-shopping and fancy-hat-wearing.
This is not a list of overrated movies. It’s a list of movies people hate that may or may not have received anything in the way of actual critical acclaim. You see list of music like this all the time as well, where Nickelback and Imagine Dragons and Avril Lavigne are pilloried for ostensibly not being the all-time greats list-makers assume they’re considered by foolish, misguided critics.
So if you must use the concept of overrated, at least use it correctly, or you’ll be the one looking foolish.
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