Alt-Right Group Takes Credit for ‘The Last Jedi’ Backlash, Bashes ‘Star Wars’ For Including More Women
Zack Sharf
An alt-right group named Down With Disney’s Treatment of Franchises and its Fanboys is taking responsibility for flooding Rotten Tomatoes with negative reviews of the Rian Johnson-directed blockbuster. One of the biggest headlines surrounding the film has been the fan backlash, specifically the movie’s shockingly low Rotten Tomatoes user score. As of this posting, “The Last Jedi” currently has a 54% user score from over 132,000 reviews.
The number is in direct contrast to the film’s A CinemaScore and 92% critic score on the website, which has made some question what exactly is going on. A moderator for the alt-right group has broken his silence to The Huffington Post to claim that the group has been using bots to significantly bring down the film’s Rotten Tomatoes user score.
The moderator explained to The Huffington Post that the group is upset with “Star Wars” for “introducing more female characters into the franchise’s universe.” The group is also not happy that Poe Dameron (Oscar Isaac) has become a “victim of the anti-mansplaining movement” and that characters like Poe and Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) are in danger of being “turned gay.” The moderator said men should be “reinstated as rulers of society,” and expressed distaste for the way “The Last Jedi” disrespects the franchise’s history.
“There were supposed to be a trilogy of books and then some after set in the Legends canon. But [Lucasfilm executives] Kathleen Kennedy and Pablo Hidalgo wanted to pursue their own feminist [sic] agenda,” the moderator wrote to The Huffington Post. “I was never going to like ‘The Last Jedi’ anyway because [it] erases everything the Extended Universe ever did.”
As for his issues with the focus on female characters, the moderator said, “Did you not see everything that came out of ‘Ghostbusters’? That is why. I’m sick and tired of men being portrayed as idiots. There was a time we ruled society and I want to see that again. That is why I voted for Donald Trump.”
According to the moderator, the group flooded Rotten Tomatoes with both positive and negative reviews there “scent could be thrown off.” Some of the bots were not efficient, however, which resulted in some of the negative “The Last Jedi” reviews going on to “The Shape of Water” page. A one-and-a-half-star review on “The Shape of Water” page, for instance, reads: “To slow, unnecessary side story about a casino, WHO WAS SNOKE!!!!, and Rose is annoying.”
A Rotten Tomatoes representative told HuffPost they are taking the claim “very seriously” and have a team of “security, network, social, database experts who monitor all of our platforms and they haven’t seen any unusual activity.”
