We watched Alex Garland’s MEN last night, and I’m really mad that I didn’t go see it in theaters back when it came out. When the original trailer first hit, I was very hyped, especially as we had just recently seen Annihilation. But for some reason, when it came out and the reviews were mediocre, I skipped it. Big mistake. Every negative review is undeserved. It’s beautiful, bold, and disgusting; another great addition to Alex Garland’s filmography.

Yeah, okay, so Companion really illustrates the problem with Rotten Tomatoes. The movie has a 93% on RT, but clearly is not a “93/100” movie. It felt like a solid 7.5 to me, which absurdly means “maybe better than average” when measuring media on an out-of-ten scale. This is because RT is binary, a review is either positive or negative, so a “universal 7” ends up being basically a 100% movie on RT.

On Metacritic, which averages out the review scores for media, Companion has a much more understandable 70 out of 100. As someone who, just this moment, watched the movie… I agree with this. It’s entertaining, it doesn’t absolutely insult my intelligence, and it only mildly squanders a fun idea, that has been done to death in various ways, by mostly retreading all the ways it’s been done before instead of doing something truly inventive and exciting with it.

I’ll say that it was much better than Mickey 17 but that’s a low, low, low bar.

If you were excited to watch Mickey 17 like I was because you really liked Snowpiercer, and (of course) Parasite… temper those expectations, Mickey 17 is a total mess. No idea how it has reviews as positive as it does, because it’s just… not very good, or maybe not any good, really. It is just a loud, flashy, audacious mess.