Metacritic rating 28
why so low?
shareMisunderstood, ahead of its time. People hated the fact that it was so different from the show.
I think it's fantastic. It's like that evil eerie twin brother that we see in soaps.
MovieChat Forums > Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me (1992) Discussion > Metacritic rating 28
Probably a biased or small sample of critics, if you look at the movies page on rotten tomatoes it's a bit more fair.
shareSmall sample size combined with the fact that virtually all featured reviews are from 1992 while the film's reception and reputation have considerably improved eversince. It's actually quite amusing to read many of those reviews as there are some genuinely strange things said about FWWM - it's "misanthropic", "bereft of any genuine emotion" and a "campy, ironic self parody". The respected New York Times critic Vincent Canby goes deepest, offering a rather IMDb-trollish assessment that "it's not the worst movie ever made, it just seems that way". Hm.
"facts are stupid things" Ronald Reagan
Me thinks a lot of folks may have recognized themselves in Leland Palmer and that must not have been too comfortable.
shareThis just in . . . 7 years later after your post . . . . Metacritic rating up to 45.
share
Oh, it was given an absolute critical mauling when it was released.
Most Lynch films were initially disliked by US critics, actually. They were better received elsewhere. For example, Wild at Heart won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, which you might imagine would alert American entertainment critics such as Roger Ebert to it possibly, just possibly having some merit... but, no, he -- and they -- utterly trashed it.
Anyway, Fire Walk with Me received a typical reaction to a Lynch film, except with added 'But this isn't like the TV show!'
You have to be fan of the show to get it.
shareThis is true.
But also a lot of the bad reviews in 1992 were from people who did enjoy the show who resented it not being very much like the show.
There's a reason Fire Walk With Me begins with an axe going through a television set. It's confrontational.
Also, it's tough subject matter. There's nothing in Fire Walk With Me that wasn't also present in the ABC show, but in the TV series it's cushioned by the quirky soap opera parody stuff. Here, it's directly addressed, laid absolutely bare. And it doesn't blink or turn away.
British film critic Mark Kermode tells a story against himself about Blue Velvet. When he first saw Blue Velvet, he walked out. And then he wrote what he describes as 'a very snotty and dismissive review' of it in whatever newspaper he was writing for at the time.
A couple of years later, he rewatched it. And he realised that he had been totally and utterly wrong. The film had just got under his skin to such a degree that he -- a man who wrote his dissertation on horror films, by the way -- couldn't handle it and he outright rejected it. 'No, no, no, I don't want to deal with that.'
And, basically, I think that's what happened with the wider reaction to Fire Walk With Me. It got under people's skin in ways they weren't prepared for.