Which Movies Are the Most Polarizing? A Statistical Analysis | Hacker News Reader

Which Movies Are the Most Polarizing? A Statistical Analysis

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57 pointsthunderbong86 comments

I remember reading that Napoleon Dynamite was not only polarizing but it was incredibly hard to predict if someone would like it or not based on their previous viewing history. Netflix struggled with this in their rating system for a while.

https://www.cracked.com/article_35884_that-time-napoleon-dyn...

Napoleon Dynamite. I guess you were a victim of autocowreck.

Fixed thx

I wonder if that was due to how much awkwardness there was in the movie.

* It's a divisive mood. Some people find it relatable and cathartic (and hilarious in the context of comedy), while others find it intolerable to the point that they will leave the room during awkward scenes.

* It's not a common type of humor, especially in mainstream American movies, so people are unlikely to have many other awkward comedies in their viewing history.

* Napoleon Dynamite took it to such a degree that even people who enjoy it in small doses might have become exhausted by it as the film went on. (As far as I can recall, that's how I experienced the film.)

It's probably in cult movie territory. I vaguely remember not necessarily hating it but it's not something I would rewatch by choice.

And cult movies--more or less by definition--are polarizing.

It's awkwardness reminds me of dry British humor similar to The Office. Very few shows are like this in the US.

I think you're probably right. It's the sort of thing I can watch but I certainly don't love it the way some people do. I can even take or leave a lot of Monty Python (though some, e.g. Life of Brian, I do love).

Most polarizing for me are the dramatized history movies like Napoleon. Most of the public will not be aware of what parts are true, and what parts are fiction. History will be remember as portrayed by these movies. They're basically committing falsification of history. It will be hard for the public to learn from history, if history is portrayed incorrectly in these movies.

Was it any good? I haven't seen a movie in years but this one seemed interesting as a history buff. Getting Napoleon right and that whole era is incredibly challenging - even after reading several books about the guy and those times, I'm still confused.

I thought it was pretty bad. It made Napoleon out to be uncharismatic and a total "simp" as the kids would say towards Josephine. He just comes off as a war monger Dictator who is ruining Europe for his single-minded vision of personal grandeur.

That's not the read I get on the man from my reading, so I found it very disappointing from a historical perspective.

From the "is it fun to watch" point of view... it was middling for me. Some of the battle scenes were cool, and there were some funny lines throughout that made me laugh, but overall as a story I found it pretty uninspired. Like, Gladiator had tons of historical inaccuracies as well, but it stood on its own as a really fun movie to watch and I can't put Napoleon in that category.

That's a bummer. It's prob the only movie I've looked forward to in a long time. Oh well.

We don't really get to see Napoleon the man. He is portrayed as an oddly bland man, passively floating through events, which is so incredibly at odds from the reality of the man as I understand him. Really, all of the character attributes that made him 'Napoleon the Great' have been cut out. None of his lasting martial or civil innovations are mentioned.

It's hard to imagine that this was an accident, since Scott clearly took great care to portray Josephine (an aging, black-toothed, capricious bimbo whose thoughtlessness was regularly a problem for Napoleon) as a young, beautiful and strong woman who was apparently "cleaning up after" Napoleon.

I got the distinct impression of a British director gleefully taking ole Boney down a notch.

Thats a bummer. Napoleon is many things, but bland and passive, are not him. The British hated him so perhaps Scott's choices were intentional :)

> Most of the public will not be aware of what parts are true, and what parts are fiction.

I doubt anyone alive now is aware of the whole truth given that it takes place 200 years ago in a politically turbulent part/era of the world.

We see errors/lies in articles about current verifiable topics all the time, surely history from hundreds of years ago had even less fidelity.

I doubt the OP refers to who decided what and when. That part does get rewritten by the winners.

It's more about historical inaccuracy overall. I think Napoleon in particular has an analysis on A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry [1].

[1] It's not a proper analysis like he's done for other movies, but here it is: https://acoup.blog/2023/11/17/fireside-friday-november-17-20...

I agree there is a difference in misrepresenting events that have lots of evidence to support them and things that would likely have poor record keeping. I had assumed a movie called Napoleon might be about the personal motivations/interactions rather than more verifiable events.

argh, this is such a bad faith argument. The enemy of better is best.

We can't know the whole truth but we have enough quality data about ancient rome from multiple angles to know "gladiator" probably shouldn't be our first lead on the matter.

Yes, I acknowledged that in a reply to a sibling comment, however, I would take any movie/tv show dialogue that suggests motivations to be speculation unless provided with heavy evidence. A lot of times, this type of stuff can paint someone as good/bad, and it is either completely made up or misrepresented for the purposes of drama and selling the media.

It would behoove everyone to never take movie representations of history as fact, even if the broad strokes are supported by evidence.

I do get the somewhat discomfort with novels and movies dealing with historical events and people. While often enjoying his work, I definitely had this feeling with much of James Michener's work. You're reading this massive tome and it's often unclear (though he did sometimes provide some notes) what is actual historical fact, what is speculative, and what is made up out of whole cloth.

If “most of the public will not be aware” it’s not going to be polarizing.. as polarizing and disputed aren’t the same thing. As far as I can tell Napoleon bombed and was largely panned, so also not polarizing.

Biopics generally have the issue that there's enough creative license taken that people looking for fidelity are unhappy while, at the same time, the writers/director are sufficiently constrained within factual guardrails that they can't necessarily create the exact movie they'd like to.

Based on my experience, 2001 should be on this list. I have seen people sit through this film in complete confusion, waiting "for the movie to start", and afterwards refusing to believe that anyone would voluntarily give up 2.5 hours of their life to watch this a second time.

Considering the list was generated from data, not just the author's opinion, I wonder what criteria you're using for "should".

My guess is a lot more of the general population feels the same (negative) way about it, but your sample of people you've seen reacting to it is giving you selection bias, thinking more people enjoy it

not many people have seen it, these days only limited and niche people would see 2001. For that reason the stats on it would be skewed towards people who would view it more favorably.

It's a film a cinemaphile would watch today for either nostalgia or historic interest. Whatever its place in the film canon (which it richly deserves) I'm pretty sure the random theater-goer today would hate it and I wouldn't really recommend they go watch it.

I laugh so hard at the opening of 2001. Not the monkeys dancing around the monolith; rather, the opening title: the orchestration of Also sprach Zarathustra crescendos on "Stanley Kubrick." What an arrogant monument to himself! One wonders if he took it so seriously or if there was a wink and nod behind it.

I do love the movie though. It drags on, and it's psychedelic in a way that doesn't really translate to modern, sober viewing; yet the special effects and researched realism larded into it would take Hollywood many more decades to embrace. And HAL is still a character for modern times.

“Plan 9” is rather predictable: mostly valued low, but some find it interesting because of that badness.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0052077/ratings/

A good Christian-themed movie will be much more polarizing and for real. For example “Old-Fashioned” (2014):

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2048824/ratings/

(Found it by specifically searching Rotten Tomatoes for movies rated lowly by critics and highly by the audience. For “Old-Fashioned” the ratio is 17/83. For “Plan 9” the ratio is 66/45, nothing spectacular.)

Oh this is also my metric for good movies and conversely I drive clear of high critics ratings with low audience ratings.

Life's too serious already, I want to enjoy watching movies

Even Roger Ebert who I think was both an excellent film critic and more an everyman in his tastes than Gene Siskel had a definite film critic mode that was more highbrow than my tastes (which are not especially lowbrow). You probably don't/didn't get into that profession without having some degree of film snobbery.

I don't think that many people (anyone?) actually think Plan 9 is a good movie in the film critic sense. Rather it's something you should watch (or at least you used to) at a midnight movie showing because "it's so bad it's good" (or at least a lot of fun in the right context).

I’m surprised none of Wes Anderson’s films are on this list. In my experience his work is incredibly polarizing. People either absolutely love it or can’t stand it. I’m in the love it category but I dig quirky films.

Agree. I am in the can't stand camp. The colors, dialogue, stories, just don't appeal. But have many friends who love these movies, and I am the odd one. Maybe someday I will get it.

The thing that makes me enjoy them is the attention to detail. He builds entire worlds and controls everything in them (at least once he got past his first few films). I’m the kind of person who enjoys watching a movie more than once and discovering new things each time, and his films are great for that.

I call these kinds of films “black licorice movies”. Nobody is really impartial: they have strong feelings one way or another.

What a coincidence! I wrote about the exact same topic just some weeks ago [0].

[0]: https://www.alexmolas.com/2023/11/14/controversial-movies.ht...

What's hard to tease out is people voting with the "so bad it's good" reasoning. Primarily horror movies are like this.

Oh, for the days when movies were rated objectively: by number of beasts, number of breasts, and number of buckets of blood...

"we paid you to make us a movie, but you made a fee-yulm"

The drive in will never die!

It's genre films in general. Fans of niche genres like horror (or religious movies, or musicals, gallows humor, etc.) have different tastes from average mainstream movie goers. Texas Chainsaw Massacre is the most obvious example of this in the article. The fans of this movie just see it as "good".

The Texas Chain Saw Massacre actually is good though. I watched it quite recently and was surprised how good the cinematography, soundtrack, performances etc were. Admittedly good in a cheap and gnarly way that suited the subject matter, not in a technically perfect way.

I think maybe the polarizing nature is that it's "good" at hitting a particular tone, or providing a particular flavour of experience. But it's not a flavour everybody wants or approves of.

Edit: It's true though that there's a market for horror movies that are not good. In fact AIUI it's about the only genre where there's any market at all at the low budget end. Maybe gangster films.

It's true though that there's a market for horror movies that are not good. In fact AIUI it's about the only genre where there's any market at all at the low budget end.

I disagree with this on both fronts.

First, budget has nothing to do with it. See the success of Clerks or Super Troopers. Sundance is around the corner. There's going to be a lot of hype around a couple of drama and comedy films shot on a small budget. There is every year...

I also disagree that people enjoy horror movies that are "not good". "Not good" is incredibly subjective, so I'm not exactly sure what you mean, but I think you're referring to people like me, who watch movies like Jack Frost (not the one with Michael Keaton), but that is because I am legitimately entertained by them, not because they are "not good" by some measure.

> There's going to be a lot of hype around a couple of drama and comedy films shot on a small budget. There is every year...

I'm talking about like $500k and under. Tangerine would be a great example of a drama film that made a splash at Sundance on a $100k budget. But, there are many films made on that kind of budget and few of them turn a profit. Tangerine's from 2015, Clerks is from 1994, Super Troopers was 2001 (also well above the budget level I'm talking about). The plucky microbudget hits are notable exceptions, not the norm.

I wasn't familiar with Jack Frost, I watched a couple of clips on Youtube and yeah, that probably is the sort of thing I mean tbh. It does look entertaining, but my point is if a movie in another genre had comparable production standards, it's much less likely it would've found an audience. The "so bad it's good" market is much more of a thing in horror than elsewhere, to the point people do it deliberately (eg. The Asylum).

This isn't meant to be a dismissal of horror or horror fans at all, lots of great film makers have arrived via low budget horror. It's great there's still a genre where self-funded films aren't entirely a money pit.

"I've seen Rocky Horror Picture Show at least five times, and I'm still unsure if it's a "good" movie"

Well, at least it wasn't so bad that he balked at watching it one more time

I think he’s saying this because the experience of seeing it at midnight with a performance troupe is distinct from the film itself. The experience can be fun even if the movie is possibly not.

I've seen it multiple times because friends loved it. And I find it vaguely entertaining, so I sat through it, trying to work out what I'm missing.

I’ve seen it multiple times and gone to several performances to figure out what I’m missing and figured out I’m missing nothing. It’s not good, and not so bad that it’s good.

I’ll watch a movie my friends like a second time to see if there was something I didn’t get. Sometimes it clicks, usually it doesn’t.

Edit to add: I typically don’t think movies should be watched multiple times to be enjoyed. There are occasions where expectations, state of mind, mood, company, etc. effect a viewing and something needs to change to get a different perspective. Sometimes enjoyment comes from the repetition (especially so bad it’s good movies), but that should be the exception.

I'm not usually much of a cult movie person. But I've seen Rocky Horror as a midnight movie, just watched it at home, own a bunch of stage soundtracks, and saw it live on stage a few weeks ago for the first time. And really like it even if it drags a bit in the second act.

It's certainly not a great movie--and it's camp--but I enjoy it.

I know the data for this aren't publicly available, but I'm curious about this analysis for HN.

E.g.:

Which commenters have lots of highly upvoted comments and highly downvoted comments?

Which comments receive lots of upvotes and lots of downvotes?

Which comments experience significant swings / oscillations in score over time?

For me it is surprising that the Passion of the Christ is not more polarizing.

Even, or perhaps especially, as a Christian, although I appreciated it, it was brutal to watch. The violence felt very visceral. This was a movie I rate highly, but can’t say that I enjoyed watching.

Agreed. I guess the explicit brutality makes sense if the goal is to help audiences understand the price that Jesus is said to have voluntarily endured.

But even Southpark reckoned it was a lot of brutality to see.

PoC was explicit gore porn, extremely well done.

I've never understood how that was supposed to advance the actual messages of Christ that people find moving and helpful. I don't think it was.

"The Revenant" had some of the same grinding brutality. We were allowed to say "this is just gore porn with no redeeming value" there, tho.

It's not really the sort of movie you'd watch if you weren't Christian or interested in religion.

I like that the top 15 contains movies I'd consider awesome and movies I'd consider utter garbage.

As polarizing as could be.

I noticed that for every movie on the list that I like, I can totally see how others might not. But for most movies that I dislike, I just don't get how people can genuinely enjoy them.

I don't know what that says about anything but I found it curious.

I'm the same way and I think this might be a manifestation of both the false consensus effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_consensus_effect) and false uniqueness effect (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False-uniqueness_effect).

When people like something we don't like, we are shocked that they could disagree with us as to how awful that things is. "Can't you see it?! The dialogue is unnatural, the premise is implausible, the production design looks like it was outsourced to the cheapest contractors money could find and the characters are unrelatable! What trauma must you have endured to actually enjoy that trash?! You poor thing!"

But when it comes to something we like that other people don't like ... well, that's understandable after all. We're unique ;)

Films are "polarizing" for many reasons, and this article attempts to categorize some of them - Low-Budget Cult Classics, Inescapable Franchise Films, Horror Movies That Went Mainstream...

But there is one film in that list that defies categorization along those lines, and it happens to be the only film in it I have watched and enjoyed multiple times. A film quietly ignored by all the discussion. That film is Babe: Pig in the City.

I am not eloquent enough to unpack what makes this film special. Fortunately, someone else is, and you can read their take here: https://junkee.com/babe-pig-in-the-city/299986 . Some excerpts: "a fetish object made to satisfy a sexual proclivity that does not yet exist", "some hideous goo scraped off the surface of the human id", "What You Think About Babe: Pig In The City Tells Me What You Think About Art", and "essentially purposeless in its horrifying nature".

It strikes me that the common feature that connects Babe: Pig In the City and the other categories the article mentions is a mismatch between the expected and received amount of "art house-iness". An arty film thrust into the mainstream through organic hype? Polarizing. A bland high budget corporate thing popular through the sheer weight of overmarketing? Polarizing. A haunting and wildly tonally inconsistent study of the crushing weight of society upon the underprivileged marketed as the sequel to a beloved and uncomplicated children's film with talking farm animals? Polarizing...

That film’s on my to-watch list because everything I’ve heard about it is along the lines of “it’s… actually good. Not good for a sequel to a mediocre kids’ movie in the talking/telepathic-live-action-animals subgenre, but actually good. For adults.”

It’s also trivia-bait, because it was directed by George Miller. As in, Mad Max George Miller.

This is a remarkably excellent and in-depth article. It's not just a list of the most polarizing movies, but separates them out by categories and genres and tags and timelines and goes into speculating about the whys. Kudos to the author.

The most interesting part for me was the user-generated tags most associated with polarizing films. The top five by rank:

  1. Low budget
  2. Jesus
  3. Stupid
  4. Musical
  5. Jim Carrey

All of which seem to make perfect sense, no matter which side of them you're on (except, well, #3 which is amusingly redundant/meta...).

I was amazed that some friends of mine hated In Bruges (after I'd been praising it to the skies). Didn't expect that reaction and it made me much more cautious about recommending films to people.

You need better friends. ;)

Ha. No they're great. Just different in that respect :-)

Had the same experience, I think it's a brilliant movie and my friends thought I was an idiot for wasting their time.

I didn't recommend Banshees to them, that's for sure.

You will probably enjoy The Lobster.

Ta. You might like Wild Tales. It's on prime and in Spanish with subtitles. My son and his mates loved it too.

Loved the Lobster, was indifferent about Bruges, detested The Banshees of Inisherin

I don't think liking on suggest anyone would like the other 2

Yeah sure. But they're all very similar if you think about it; same clueless, innocent role played by Colin Farrel, with the same flat and dark humor.

Hey there, I'm the author of this article (but not the OP). Thrilled to see all the discussion here. I'm glad folks are enjoying the analysis—hope the findings aren't too polarizing.

"Tracking ratings variance by release year, we observe an increase in review variability starting in the late 1970s, followed by a precipitous decline in variance starting in the early 2000s."

I'm sure there is also some time dependent effect in how people rate movies now vs. in the past. For a snapshot in current time, one would need to be careful to not include ratings from too long ago as society and norms change.

Not surprised to see Bio-Dome on the list. Several people I know love that love but in general don't like Pauly Shore movies. Something about it makes it an exception and I'm not quite sure what it is.

I'm surprised to see Biodome there, I never met anybody who disliked it.

Don't Look Up was an interesting one.

Some thought it was hilarious, some got depressed.

It wasn't terrible, but the satire should have been much subtler. The cast of all A-listers came across as self-indulgent and annoying to me as well.

I enjoyed the film overall, but I agree that the satire was quite heavy-handed, particularly with Jonah Hill's character.

I understand that it was intended to be over-the-top, but it was too much for me.

Yeah, the folks in my group who watched it had such a negative reaction I didn’t bother with it. But as I recall the complaint wasn’t that it was depressing, but that it was a movie length “do you get it? Do you get the bit? We better do it harder just to be sure.”

That film was particularly interesting as (maybe unintentionally on the part of the film-makers) both sides of the political spectrum thought it was satirizing the other side.

This movie doesn't work tonally. It tries to be both serious and satirical. And it fails to make both of those world work together.

In the Idiocracy what made it work is that the satire applied to the whole world except of the main character that we as audience identified with. You explore the boundaries of the new absurd reality with them.

There isnt anything like that in Dont Look Up, its a strange mix of our current day reality with crazy illogical morons.

I think I adore this list.

    1. Plan 9 from Outer Space
    2. The Passion of the Christ
    3. Twilight
    4. Pink Flamingos
    5. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
    6. Transformers....

Imagine if they had resurrected Jesus in plan 9, the polarization on that one would be out of this world!

I'm surprised The Birth of a Nation didn't make it on the list. It's probably one of the most controversial films ever.

I don’t think a lot of viewers, in the last few decades, watch it without the context of knowing it’s film-historically very important.

FWIW—subject matter aside, even—it was among my least favorite in a silent film binge I went on a couple years back. Of the 50ish silent dramas and art films I’ve watched (setting aside the comedies) it’s in the bottom 5. It’s actually one of only two I’ve bailed on (Tabu was the other). Only made it about halfway, the draw of “it’s important” wasn’t enough to keep me watching.

Why’d you bail on Tabu? I remember it being one of the more entertaining silent movies I’ve seen. As well as having a very memorable ending.

I dunno, for some reason I found the first 30 minutes or so excruciatingly dull and just didn’t care about where it was going. I really enjoyed Nanook, so was surprised. Possibly I just wasn’t in the right mood for it.

[edit] and The Last Laugh, and Sunrise, though I was less enamored of Nosferatu than I expected to be. Enjoyed those too, to connect it to Murnau as well as Flaherty.

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