You can tell a lot, but by no means everything, about a film when you go to “Rotten Tomatoes” which is described as “an American review-aggregation website for film and television.”
Arriving at the famous “Tomatometer” score is highly complicated, although you’d never know it unless you investigate the intricacies.
The point is that the score is taken as an index of how critics have judged the film. However that is often very much different than how the audience gauges a film.
Nowhere is that more clear than for Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer .
As of today the “Tomatometer” is 55%. Hmmm.
What can we learn from this about a film that sticks scrupulously close to the facts about a man who not only is serving three life sentences for deliberately delivering babies alive and then severing their spinal cords, but in whose clinic two women died?
First there are only 11 reviews, 6 up, 5 down. That is, frankly, a pathetic number for a film that is very well done and which touches on the reality of abortion in America.
Second, there is that other score for all movies at Rotten Tomatoes: “Audience score.” For Gosnell, a staggering 98% said they “liked it.”
98%!
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The co-producers and the directors and many others (including NRL News Today)attribute that disconnect to media hostility to a film that shows the seamy underbelly of an already seamy business. The criticism that both annoys and amazes me is that “Gosnell” is said to be ‘preaching to the choir.’
Think about for a second. Could it be that?
Is there something about a man who has woefully untrained staff doing most of the prep work on women, many of whom are into their second and third trimesters, and who is so unfazed by the smell and the dead cats and the urine and the blood and the moaning women and the bottles filled with the feet of aborted babies that when police raided him (not for aborting but for illegal selling prescription drugs), he casually eats his supper that might tempt you to sensationalize what happened at 3801 Lancaster Street!
Of course!
But the people who made the film fully understood that nothing needed to be exaggerated or hyped. Gosnell was a monster, allowed to prey on poor women of color by the local and state medical bureaucracies and two pro-abortion Pennsylvania governors.
In fact, they deliberately underplay the visuals. You can imagine what a photo of a full-term baby with a huge hole in her neck would look like.
My point is simple. Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer is an immensely powerful film that is not pegged specifically to pro-lifers but to anyone who is willing to squarely face the truth, regardless of what opinion they have coming into the theatre.
It is not too late to see “Gosnell.” Go to http://gosnellmovie.com/theaters for local listings.
LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. This post originally appeared in at National Right to Life News Today —- an online column on pro-life issues.
