'I Got Death Threats For Writing a Bad Review of Aquaman' (huffingtonpost.com)

The Huffington Post recently published a post by one of the 300 members of the Broadcast Film Critics Association -- and a contributing writer to Variety: I saw "Aquaman" on a brisk Monday morning in December. Though I appreciated that star Jason Momoa didn't take himself too seriously while playing an underwater superhero, the glut of CGI effects distracted me from the story. Which was hollow and nonsensical anyway. As with every movie I watch -- up to four a week, hundreds a year -- I expressed my opinion in print and online for Us Weekly, as well as my own site, MaraMovies.com. The review was also linked on Rotten Tomatoes, where I'm a Top Critic.

Since I had a lot of films on my busy holiday schedule, I quickly moved on. Hundreds of men who read my review did not.... [Example comment: "I will kill your mom, dad and friends Bcoz I want [you] to regret for what u did. I have your address and details about your family members."] I reported the messages to Instagram and was rebuffed because, per the automated response, the vitriol didn't "violate community guidelines." Didn't matter. They found me on Facebook and Twitter, too.... Nearly 2,000 people "liked" a post in which some guy made a collage of my face and a few negative reviews.... I wasn't scared by the threats as I much as I was disheartened. One guy summed it up when he messaged me: "How many of us are you going to block? There are thousands of us."
Ironically, the review wasn't all negative. It called Aquaman "the first live-action D.C. Comics movie in which a superhero actually appears to be having fun. Batman, Superman, the Suicide Squad, even our beloved Wonder Woman tend to behave as if they just lost their 401(k) savings during the apocalypse." Yet rifing on the critic's last name, one commenter still wrote "hope another Holocaust happens."

Instead of "thousands" of angry fans, it could just be hundreds who are using multiple accounts. But there's a larger issue. "I worry that reading volumes of hate mail is starting to get in my head and cause me to consider the potential angry male ramifications while I'm writing my reviews, thereby compromising my integrity."

Comments

Welcome

[JBMcB]

to the internet. You seem to be new here...

Re:Welcome

[markdavis]

>"Welcome to the internet. You seem to be new here..."

Indeed. There is a component of Internet users who apparently have a huge lack of social skills, respect for others, or even basic moral values. Having watched this Internet grow from nothing to what it is today, I think it is showing just how detached some humans can be from reality when they are not actually in front of other people. They can spew hatred and stupidity without any regard to how it affects others, because perhaps those others are not real.

It seems to be the same thing that happens when some people drive- it is as if their brains fail to compute that those other cars around them are not just stupid machines in your way, but vehicles being driven by people. People who have thoughts, feelings, motivations, desires, hopes, goals, deadlines, frustrations, just like your own and yet with different viewpoints and realities.

The other main problem with Internet communication it that it is primary written. And usually written rapidly and with little thought. As a social creature, humans rely surprisingly heavily on social cues when communicating. We already went through one dramatic change when phones came on the scene- we lost all visual cues and had to adapt to just vocal ones. But with text, we lose not only visual cues, but the audible ones as well. It is so very easy to completely misunderstand such text- especially when emotions are involved.

So my advice to those using the Internet/texting/whatever:

1) Remember that you should never write (or say) things you wouldn't do if your audience weren't right in front of you. There are actual people behind the scenes.

2) Remember the golden rule.

3) Remember that what you write/say/do is often public record. And even if it were meant to be public, it can easily be so when copied/forwarded.

4) Remember to give people the benefit of the doubt. Don't assume you know exactly what was meant.

5) Remember to place reason above emotion. I am not saying you shouldn't be emotional, or have emotion, or passion, or empathize; just don't let emotion drive all your interpretations and responses.... try to have balance and run things through your logical mind before acting.

Re:Welcome

[Jharish]

Thank you for adding some intelligence, I used to love reading comments in Slashdot but now it makes me wonder what happened to humanity.

The biggest impact social media seems to have had on humans is the idea that if someone disagrees with you, it's because they are obviously stupid and desire your ridicule and vitriol. There no longer seems to be intelligent debate or even discussions on the likes of FB or Twitter in the same way you had it in the old days of Usenet and other public internet forums.

I'm saddened that the average person is more like Donald Trump than any sort of intelligent, thinking being while on the internet and its taking its toll on the smart people who remember what it was like to have a discussion with other smart people.

Re:Welcome

[Barny]

And the problem is worse thanks to how Facebook et-al work. People end up in bubbles of "friends" that all agree with them, so it makes a dissenting voice (like a movie review) seems abhorrent to them.

Re: Welcome

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, I'll bite. He installed a cabinet of people that want to dismantle everything we've accomplished thus far. Head of EPA: against the environment. Head of Education: against public education. Head of DOE: didn't know it meant nuclear. Head of FCC: against net neutrality. He filled the proverbial swamp rather than drain it. He essentially kidnapped thousands of children at the southern border. He's simply not a moral or ethical person, and often acts beneath the dignity of the office.

"the potential angry male ramifications"

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, this is really just a female being hounded by nerdy incels. It likely has little to do with Aquaman, if anything.

Proof positive.

[burtosis]

The fact aquaman is grossing over a billion dollars worldwide so soon ahead of so many other titles is proof we are now in an alternate timeline.

Re:Proof positive.

[Stormwatch]

Oh, in this timeline the *live action* "Beauty and the Beast" movie is the 14th largest grossing film *ever*.

Not the live action B&TB movie, but merely a live action B&TB movie. There are several, the most noteworthy being Jean Cocteau's 1946 version.

Never pay attention to internet hate

[SuperKendall]

"I worry that reading volumes of hate mail is starting to get in my head and cause me to consider the potential angry male ramifications while I'm writing my reviews, thereby compromising my integrity."

So then, why are you reading it?

It's usually apparent in the first few words what is going on. Just stop reading and move on. It's not even worth the effort of writing up a rebuttal, unless maybe you use the effort for a writing exercise or just for the lols.

But if you do read it, just remember that death threats on the internet are absurdly hollow. No-one wants to actually get up from a chair and do anything about anything (in that regard, possibly people with standing desks should be taken slightly more seriously - they will definitely let you know if they have a standing desk).

If you have more of your public info known maybe take steps to give the local police a heads-up about possible swatting attempts, but that's as far as you need to think about it.

The internet has seen people issuing all manner of death threats or creepy vibes since the dawn of time. Taking any of it even a tiny bit seriously makes zero sense. Just think of them as a write-only form of fan and happily keep doing what you do. There a special irony these days in people that hate follow you, in that they are inherently increasing your internet "attention metric" which makes you numerically more important than you would be otherwise!

One is compelled to wonder...

[mark-t]

... why a threat to kill someone, anyone, would not be a violation of their terms of service.

Honestly, if it isn't, I would have stopped using the service... and if my job depended on it, I would explain to my employer why I did so, or at the very least, require a raise on account of needing danger pay.

Not at all...

[SuperKendall]

(1) It's her fault for feeling bad.>

No - I'm saying it's in her ability to not feel bad about it. Big distinction, which I'm sure will elude you but I think the smarter among us will grok it.

(2) She should be thankful for the attention.

The term "thankful" is incorrect. However as long as anyone is able to shrug off negative comments, in fact there is a net positive - especially for someone writing for publication, what the "corporate machine" as it were sees is a LOT of comments on something you wrote. Score!

See what a lot of people don't seem to understand here is that the saddest thing on the internet is to write something, which no-one pays any attention to. Hate or Love are signs that you have moved someone, which is valuable either way - because you have changed the universe in same way, at least a little bit.

(3) Her level of fame is undeserved.

I'm not sure how you get there from where I was, her level of fame simply IS. How anyone could state a particular level of fame is "undeserved" makes zero sense to me, as it is what they have and "deserved" does not enter in the equation.

Going back to specifics, I think her review was probably about right (not having seen the movie yet it's hard to be sure, but it sounds right from what I've heard).

Generically, I'm just giving everyone advice on how to live, so as to lead a happy and productive life that elevates humanity as a whole instead of being lowered by a small fragment of it. Going back to that Love/Hate thing, both are energy and all energy can provide fuel for your own creative efforts. Nuclear material is powerfully destructive, but energy from a nuclear plant can power a million greenhouses of the finest flowers...

WTF?

[rsilvergun]

Seriously? I know the anti-SJWism is strong on this forum, but no, nobody outside of a few YouTuber's looking for the next big controversy to rile their fanbase up with and solicit Patreon donations with even noticed they got a heart throb to play Aquaman (which is the extent of the "marketing" towards women).

I mean, the first Thor movie was pretty crap and there were't any death threats there. And don't you tell me it's anti male because there's a strong female lead in it. Go read the bloody comics. Aquaman's wife is a fucking bad ass and has been since the late 70s (not sure before then, didn't follow that era). You wanna piss off Aquaman fans (both of us)? Go make a male power fantasy where his wife needs a savin'.

Re:Feminist hates on male Superhero. Gets hate mai

[Freischutz]

Huffpost is not long for this world. They are owned by AOL/Verizon. Verizon gives companies 2-3 years to 'prove themselves'. Then they come in and tear shit up if it is not 'performing'. There is no way huffingtonpost is performing. Dialup is performing better from what I remember.

Media outlets owned by corporations or other special interest groups operate by different rules than other companies. The way they perform is measured by how many people they reach because that translates directly into the ability to shape public opionin which has all kinds of benefits for the owner of the outlet other that what nickels and dimes they earn off of it. If a media outlet turns a profit that is only gravy.

Psychopaths and sadists

[LetterRip]

2% of the population are psychopaths; also 2% are sadists.

In a world of nearly 8 billion people - with 4% psychopaths or sadists that is 320 million people who have a natural tendency to do such behavior. So when you are on a platform like twitter or instagram and can be contacted by anyone - chances are you are going to encounter a large number of them. Since the platforms allows some anonymity - they can engage in their behavior with little risk of repercussions.

Wow

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

You people posting these hateful replies and death threats (!!) in response to a movie review need to get a life.

If you have a life, then you need to get a better one.

I can't imagine being so incensed over a movie review as to actually start making death threats.

For example, casting that pint-sized douchebag Tom Cruise as the character "Jack Reacher" really, really, really pissed me off, but it never occurred to me to send a death threat to anyone over it. Sheesh.

(For those of you who aren't familiar with the original, actual Jack Reacher character, one of his main distinguishing features is that he's a big guy- really big. Like, way way way bigger than Tom Cruise. That's part of his whole schtick- he's a great big dude. It's central to his entire character.
Picking Tom Cruise to play Jack Reacher was the single most fucked-up character casting choice I've ever seen in my life, period. It would be like picking one of the Oompa Loompas to play Arnold Schwarzenegger, or having Liberace play "Dog The Bounty Hunter.")

A negative review, not a bad review

[Atmchicago]

You mean to say that you wrote a negative review of the movie. Not that writing a bad review is ever justification to receive death threats, but now you're at risk of getting hate mail from the grammar Nazis too.

Would rather drink in a bar with bouncers

[rbrander]

I recently caught an article by Max Read about how much of the Internet is "fake" in the sense that the readership is actually bots defrauding those paying for the ads:
http://nymag.com/intelligencer...

I bring up this topic because it strikes me that the people paying for all these sites may soon demand to know how many verifiable human beings are actually in the audience.

5 years ago, much less 20, you wouldn't have caught me saying that a lot of the web should be not locked behind paywalls exactly, but require proof-of-individual-humanity at least. And that would in practice lead to "proof" via credit card. Now I'm ready to cave on that anyway.

I'd rather live in a society that has cops; rather drink in a bar that has bouncers. I'd rather talk in a space where threats of violence result in not only permanent expulsion, but the same legal consequences as saying the same thing to my face. (An assault charge. Mere threats are an assault. Hence the term "assault and battery" if actual contact occurs.) Right now, assault is a crime IRL but not on the Internet, in any practical sense.

And I think that 99% of this crap would stop if the commentators all knew that the threatened person could find out where they live and send over cops with an assault charge.

I have an appalling habit, of comments on news columns. It's pointless, I know, it's identical to shouting at the TV, but there you go. (It started with /. in the 90s) I notice that the NYT and WaPo, which require a sign-up to comment, almost never have harsh language, much less threats. I used to comment at The Atlantic, which did not...and now The Atlantic has shut down the whole comment system, since they were just providing a chat room that was mostly used by angry people, the thoughtful ones having been chased out of the bar with no bouncers.

Idiot doesn't read review and just assumes...

[skam240]

Her review is hardly a feminist critique of the movie. The negative points it details are bad CGI, wooden acting, cheese ball lines, and poor romance sub plot chemistry while acknowledging that the character of Aquaman himself was much more fun than the rest of the DC universe heroes.

Now I haven't seen the movie so I have no idea how accurate her claims are but what is glaringly obvious is that there's no radical feminist agenda preset in it.

Re:Srsly?

[AmiMoJo]

It's not well explained but in this case there is more to the story.

After Wonder Woman was the only decent DC movie and held up as proof that a female lead and director can make a good action/comic book movie, there was a bit of a backlash from the Men's Rights crowd. They decided that they would manufacture the same kind of buzz about Aquaman, holding him up as an example of the ideal hyper-masculine dude after Wonder Woman kinda humiliated him in Justice League.

What you have to understand is that they really don't care about men's rights, they just hate feminism and blame it for all their problems. So they wanted to make sure that Aquaman did well and send a message to the studios that manly man men movies were more profitable and popular.

Thus anyone criticising Aquaman is a target of these guys.

Re:I seem to aggree with the review

[fahrbot-bot]

Aquaman was probably one of the better DC movies.

Perhaps, I haven't seen it yet, but after hearing Pitbull's cover of "Africa" for the film, and then very desperately wishing I could un-hear it, I'll probably wait to see Aquaman after I'm dead, if I end up in Hell -- or if I become deaf between now and then.

Re:Problem is scale though

[mark-t]

You can be pretty lax on what sort of comments are allowed and still draw the line when someone makes a threat against a person's life without really worrying about trying to censor people's views.

How did she know they were men?

[grasshoppa]

The specific use of a gender over the generic "people" suggests the author has a chip on her shoulder; how does she know it was men, or all men?

While I'm certain some people threatened him...

[AbRASiON]

Two issues.

1, "Huffington Post"
2, "Hundreds of *men* who read my review did not" (which is exactly why, Huffington Post gives a shit)

Jason Momoa is a handsome man, currently in the "omg yes please!" Club for girls (and some men) across the world. I find it hard to believe this guy was threatened only by men. Furthermore, I suspect this was exaggerated, due again to #1, who have an act to grind.
They may as well be called "extreme left, hate white men post" at this point.

http://i.4pcdn.org/tv/14639966...

Re:While I'm certain some people threatened him...

[AbRASiON]

Oh one more thing!

How is this news for nerds, stuff that matters? I'm surprised BeauHD didn't post it, to be honest.

Re:I seem to aggree with the review

[Farmer Tim]

...but which super hero movie has an ironclad plot.

Iron Man, obviously.

The ad explicitly implied most men harass

[SuperKendall]

The ad said directly that "some" men were OK. That implies the rest, or majority, are not... how is that not an attack on men generally?

The whole ad had a condescending tone of an educational film you were forced to watch in school. Even ignoring that aspect though, clearly the ad is claiming most men harass women, which is simply not the case.

Re:Srsly?

[thegarbz]

Thus anyone criticising Aquaman is a target of these guys.

Why do you always default to SJW bullshit rather than realising that there actually a lot of angry comic fans out there. Death threats to reviewers aren't even new, and certainly predate Aquaman and Wonder Woman. Some people are just pissed that Warner Brothers are shitting on their childhood memories by releasing flops that get hammered in the reviews.