Say what you will about each and every film critic being just another opinion on top of the pile, but it mustn’t be overlooked that their responsibility is to take their deliberately crafted media literacy and transform it into informative, good-faith, accessible knowledge that gets the public up to speed on what is and isn’t worth their time, all things considered.
That’s not to say, of course, that every critic heeds this oath with the respect it deserves, and when the consequences of that begin to bear their teeth, they can and should be criticized in their own right, and filmmaker Scott Derrickson has wasted no time in weighing in on the conversation.
The Doctor Strange director took to Twitter to air his frustrations with a certain trend in film criticism these days, namely the flak that some films tend to catch for feeling familiar. Of course, anyone with the slightest bit of experience in storytelling knows good and well that the human race has been telling the same three stories over and over again, just with different characters, settings, ideas, set pieces, and creative origins.
We’d further wager that the same critics who decry well-treaded ground in any form would be just as quick to lambast a movie that makes artistically contrarian choices for the sake of it, and while that would almost certainly be a valid criticism, it would just as quickly shed some light on the actual angle that critic is taking, so to speak. Indeed, just like the movies they critique, perhaps film critics all over should consider how they themselves are about their craft.