The Reel Rating

Hello all!

Apologies for the long gap between posts but it has been a hectic few weeks of results, birthdays and holidaying. However, as promised here is an introduction to my own unique movie rating system that will be featured will all of my future reviews. Enjoy!

When I was trying to come up with interesting things to put on my blog, it dawned on me that the current ways of rating films, despite being effective, are rather simplistic. The percentage system, a score out of 10 and 5 star rankings are the most common (and pretty much the only) current ways of rating films but they all just prescribe a film with a single numerical value without revealing anything about the different aspects that make a film a masterpiece or a flop. There are some films that rate badly by these systems but have one very good element that goes unpraised while others gain high ratings but still have flaws that go without mention. Therefore, I proudly introduce the Reel Rating!

How it works... 

The Reel Rating, rather than being numerical, is a visual representation of a film’s worth using a circle split into different segments. Each layer of the circle represents a number value ranging from 0 to 5 (0 being very bad and 5 being very good) and each line segment represents one of eight qualities I've used to judge each film. These eight qualities are; performance, visuals, plot and writing, representative (meaning how well the film represents different people and aspects of society), production and editing, entertaining, enlightening and sound and music. I chose these specifically because I think they incorporate every aspect that makes up a film without penalising certain genres. A red shape is then used to show how I would rate each of these qualities as the example shows below:

The finished product should hopefully allow you to see not only how good the film is by how big the shape is but also to see how well rounded the film is by how circular the shape is. It should also allow prospective movie goers to see what the film’s strengths and weaknesses are in a bit more detail than a few stars can. 

So that is my new rating system and I hope you like it. If you have any suggestions on how to improve it or anything you'd like to say about this idea, then please don’t hesitate to comment. The first official Reel Rating will be released within the next few days alongside my first review (I know, exciting stuff)!

Thanks for reading!