'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

[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.

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!

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.