Hacker Cinema
Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves
1991 · Film · 143 min
Directed by Kevin Reynolds
Nobleman crusader Robin of Locksley breaks out of a Jerusalem prison with the help of Moorish fellow prisoner Azeem and travels back home to England. But upon arrival he discovers his dead father in the ruins of his family estate, killed by the vicious sheriff of Nottingham, Robin and Azeem join forces with outlaws Little John and Will Scarlett to save the kingdom from the sheriff's villainy.
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5 comments on Hacker News
While I had copies of Zork laying around, my formative gaming was done when Sierra's 80s titles were brand new. They were made for another time when people were different. They were more like reading a book than playing a game of paintball or laser tag. Movies have changed since I was a child as well, you don't see the majority of films being like say, Robin Hood Prince of Thieves being made today.
I've read Ken Williams was against putting violence into video games, in case you need another example of how people and times changed. They didn't think it was necessary, and it's not. These days you'd be insulted for holding such a sentiment. Before Half Life, I can count the number of times overt violence was in Sierra's games. Even Half Life, the last project Ken Williams greenlighted, was very tastefully done.
The culture has changed, we don't make founders like the Williams anymore, and thus products aren't like they used to be, which has further changed the culture. Those were good times though! The Williams naturally and effortlessly hired and had many star female game designers, had multicultural elements in their games, and none of it came off awkward or weird like today's forced efforts come across to people. People just acted-good in a low-key and humble way, rather than tried to look-good as with today.
If you, the reader, wasn't cognizant during the 80s and early 90s, I can say for sure to you that this country (speaking to the US) has changed. The Williams to me, always represented the best of it. Roberta Williams is very deserving of recognition.
Aha, no, not even a King Arthur movie -- she played "Mortianna" in Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Lots of other big stars from the time in that: https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0102798/fullcredits/cast/
So, sorry, my parent post was irrelevant in this context.
'Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves' and 'Love Actually' are my favorite AR movies.
Rotten Tomatoes does contain different information, and different statistics. For example, take Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.
IMDb gives a 6.9/10 from 119,115 users. That's the only real statistic it gives us; there is no 'Metascore' for this movie. (Personally I think the Oscar nomination should be mentioned next to this score, but it's sort of buried further down the page)
Rotten Tomatoes, on the other hand, shows us several numbers. The Tomatometer is at 50% for "All Critics", with an average rating of 5.7/10 and 52 reviews. The "Top Critics" Tomatometer is at 36%, with an average rating of 5.9/10 and 14 reviews. The Audience rating, however, is 73%, with an average rating of 3.4/5 from 333,273 users.
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The above example shows how you can sometimes use IMDb's stats of general ratings as a median reference between the audience numbers and critics numbers. But this doesn't always paint the best picture. Let's take another example: the recent (and generally accepted as a flop) 47 Ronin.
Here, IMDb gives us a 6.3/10 rating from 60,849 users. But it also gives a Metascore of 29/100. Yet the number in a gold star in bigger font is just the '6.3'. So even though this movie has a dramatically lower Metascore, they only feature the general user rating from IMDb.
The story is much more dramatic on Rotten Tomatoes. It has a 13% 'All Critics' Tomatometer rating from 72 reviews, with an average rating of 4.1/10. The 'Top Critics' Tomatometer shows 0% with 13 reviews and an average rating of 2.9/10; not one single top critic liked this film, out of 13 critics! Yet the audience rating shows 51% with an average of 3.3/5 with 53,921 ratings.
We can see how IMDb got its '6.3' rating here: both seem to show a middle-of-the-road rating from general audience ratings. But Rotten Tomatoes' critics stats show this movie isn't worth wasting two hours of your life on. The gamble of whether you may like the movie or not becomes more certainly less likely when you take the critics' reviews into consideration.
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As we can see above, even within each website, sometimes they have not only greatly varying statistics, but sometimes missing or hidden information (Robin Hood not having a Metacritic rating and not prominently displaying the oscar nod). People weigh their options based on the data they have at hand, so the information you give people - along with its context - will change their minds greatly, regardless of the source.
This is why I think it's much more realistic to look at multiple different sites. You need as much information as you can get, and no one site gives you all the relevant data, as it varies from film to film and user community to user community. It would seem you can't just depend on 'the crowd' to give someone an accurate idea of whether they will like a film; a survey would probably be better, but nobody's going to survey every film they watch.
Aren't they suppose to compare this year with some of the other years
Of course not. That would be mindful. This is a mindless nostalgia piece, right out of central casting.
The fun thing to do when one of these articles arrives on the radar is to see which cherry-picked "classics" are being name-checked:
"The Godfather," "Jurassic Park," "Casablanca," "Gone with the Wind," "My Fair Lady" and "The Matrix,"
These lists are always carefully constructed. In this case we have two extremely popular classics from the 1930s, generally regarded as among the best films ever made. That's to establish your street cred as someone who has actually seen some great movies. Then one film each from the 60s, 70s, early 90s, and late 90s, to ensure that every one of your readers over the age of thirty has something to be nostalgic about, and that they believe that the author is sufficiently "hip". (No sense in listing too many films from the 2000s; twentysomethings don't read newspapers.)
Then I got as far as this line:
Where once there was "Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves," there is now "Robin Hood," prince of duds.
This line is a dead giveaway, because "Prince of Thieves" was not a good movie, let alone among the best Robin Hood movies; it was redeemed only by the presence of Alan Rickman. Why, then, is the movie praised here? Because the writer really needed to write a cute sentence, reality be damned.
That's about all you need to read. The rest just wrote itself. It can read itself as well.