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Comment by jerf | Hacker News Reader

Well, it reviews worse than a lot of Pixar movies. Although the idea that all Pixar movies review well is a bit of a selective memory thing too. I observe there's basically two tiers of Pixar movies, the ones that get 9+ out of 10, and the ones that come in at 7 or below. There's not a lot of "OK" Pixar movies, though Incredibles 2 happens to be one of them.

Also, somewhat ironically, I disagree that Cars (Metacritic: 73) is one of Pixar's worst, on the grounds that there are quite a few worse movies from Pixar, not least of which are the two sequels Cars 2 (Metacritic: 57) and Cars 3 (Metacritic: 59) and the spinoff Planes (Metacritic: 39 (!)). Cars is slow, and dripping with nostalgia callouts for people who are now in their 70s or 80s (I asked my father, currently mid-60s, and he said it was even older than anything he was nostalgic for), but it's at least watchable once.

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Worth pointing out that Planes is NOT a Pixar film so you can't count that in your metrics.

I did not know that. My apologies to Pixar.

Averaging subjective metrics doesn't turn them into an objective metric.

But it will be highly, highly correlated to any reasonable objective metric agreed to by the general public, so it's close enough for government work. I wouldn't use Metacritic to declare an 81 is better than an 80, but a 85 being better than a 44 is pretty solid.

Of course, there's a multiplicity of possible objective metrics, but then, that's why I phrased my sentence the way I did. You're free to define your own, but then, nobody else will care, either.

> any reasonable objective metric

Any true objective metric would rank films would likely be uncorrelated with reviews - stuff like frames per second, duration, resolution, etc.

I'm of the opinion that talking about "objective metrics" in a discussion of the quality of films makes zero sense. I don't think there is any meaningful way to say any film is objectively worse than another.

Perhaps it seems I'm being too narrow in my definition of "objective," but i don't think so. I'm using it to mean what the word actually means, instead of using "objectively" to mean "in my opinion, which is better than yours," which is how 'whywhywhywhy used it, as far as I can tel.

Which is why I said "will be highly, highly correlated to any reasonable objective metric", rather than "is an objective metric".

This is a technique used all the time in science and engineering, when the underlying hypothetical metric is either impossible to obtain or may not strictly speaking exist.

To be honest, I have no idea what you are trying to say. Metacritic score is "highly, highly correlated" with film duration?

This isn't science or engineering, it's art. You can't objectively determine whether any film is "better" than any other, because the only thing that matters is how an individual viewer likes the film.

We seem to be talking past one another. Have a nice day.

"To be honest, I have no idea what you are trying to say."

Yes you do. You wouldn't be this offended if you didn't. You're being disingenuous now for rhetorical effect now. Not impressed.

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