There has been an awakening. Have you felt it?
Now that the Dec.16 embargo on reviews for the next chapter in the Star Wars film saga has expired, all media avenues are now flooded with review content. But in what may have been the most secretive marketing campaign in cinematic history, Disney managed to keep most of the major spoilers for the film under wraps (until last Wednesday, that is).
Movie fans are now doing their best to both read reviews and avoid spoiler content. It has gotten to such a point that Google Chrome has actually created a downloadable extension to block spoilers from the movie.
So now that the reviews are in, what are they saying about the new movie?
A sentiment analysis of review-style tweets lines up consistently with the stellar summary of reviews (92% user rating) posted on Rotten Tomatoes.
And though it seems that some reviewers had made up their mind before they actually saw the film, not all reviews are stellar — some reviewers, in fact, did not like it (gasp).
Several patterns emerged when examining Twitter reviews, including a seemingly irresistible temptation to reach back in time: 18 per cent of reviews of the new film quoted a line of dialogue from the original trilogy, a trend that led other Twitter users to comment on this pattern.
Ten per cent of outlets posting on Twitter also re-posted their original review of the original 1977 film for nostalgia’s sake.
And as far as spoilers go, it seems most reviews steered clear: 47 per cent of review tweets explicitly mentioned that there were no spoilers in their review (something that was actually mocked by several Twitter users).
However, for some, this seemed to only apply to the written part of the review as some included several photos from the film that had not been previously available.
So the reviews are in, and it seems fans can breathe a sigh of relief. And it’s a good thing, too, because it seems that some take this film series a bit more seriously than others.