Movie ratings are a superficial and lousy assessment of films. They provide an unreasonable power to audiences who could easily weaponize numbers to simplify the complexity of a movie. They undermine movies and experience, doing more harm than aiding audiences in their selection.
While a 5-star movie might initially seem more appealing than a 3-star, the meaning of these stars is elusive. On a 1-5 scale where 5 is excellence and 1 is shit, the criteria for deeming a movie "good" or "bad" comes into question. I admit to relying on these arbitrary ratings myself; they have helped me in choosing movies based on their apparent satisfaction to others. This reliance, however, proves harmful.
Ratings make audiences dependent on what numbers (or stars, for that matter) can easily affirm existing biases. When someone chooses to watch a 5-star movie, they’ve more or less preconditioned themselves to watching a “5-star” movie even before fully engaging with it and having the first-hand experience for personal assessment. In cases where the movie doesn't align with the expected 5-star rating, two scenarios happen: either they challenge the consensus and defend their evaluation, or they succumb to the prevailing rating, potentially overlooking their judgment to avoid cognitive dissonance and productive discussions. Essentially, ratings perpetuate a bandwagon effect in which audiences lean toward dependency, taking films for granted.
Each person's encounter with a film is unique. As the saying goes, if you have 1000 people watching the same movie, then you have 1000 different movies. Ratings cannot encapsulate this diversity and instead, homogenize the plurality of individual movie experience. It’s nice that we can instantly pull up Letterboxd or IMDb and have an immediate reference to their aggregated "quality." But what's the harm if we didn't? What about having watched a "bad" movie for two hours? At least we found out about that ourselves. Then wait for how gratifying it would be when you innocently watched a "good" movie. It's like falling in love with a stranger you have only known in the past 2 hours.