The responsibility of critics

Do critics and reviewers have a responsibility to review the material objectively?

 

It is human nature to have an opinion about things, even before you know much about the thing. We call it prejudice, and leaving aside the negative connotations of racisim or sexism or what-have-you-ism, it is a practice that we all, to greater or lesser extents, perform. We judge books by their covers, we buy products based on packaging or word-of-mouth hearsay, we immediately run out to see movies starring our favorite actors or directed by our favorite directors. I am not faulting people for doing this. But I am asking, do critics (in particular, movie critics) have a responsibility on a professional level to either review the source material objectively or, if they find they are unable, to simply not review it at all?

By way of example, the Green Lantern movie opened this weekend here in the US. I haven’t bothered to look at the weekend takes to see how well it did, but judging by the number of theaters it was playing in at the cinema we went to and how crowded the 9 AM showing was, I assume it did at least alright business. This despite having gotten an abysmal 26% on Rotten Tomatoes. Now, I didn’t read ALL of the reviews (there are 180 professional reviews as of the time of this writing), but I did read a few. In particular, I read Maryann Johanson’s review at http:\\www.flickfilosopher.com.

Continue, but be warned. Here there be spoilers. Yar.