@Background Human  
It’s a subjective value judgment, you can’t not be biased.

@Background Pony #B558  
Still a better rating than Justice League.

.. and as I write this it’s sitting at 45% all critics, 55% top critics, 81% liked it.
 
That’s cool. Once the DVD and cable streams come out I’m expecting it to rise a couple points since this isn’t bad enough to scare away that crowd, and they’ll add their opinions.
 
Probably will take a very long time before we see a “fresh” rating, though.

@Background Pony #D731  
I support this opinion

@FrustrationInExcelsis  
Yeah, Pretty succinct way of putting it. ^_;

@BasilNut
 
Yeah. It wasn’t a bad movie, but… I feel it could have been more.

I’d call it a decently fair score.
 
I liked it just fine, but I walked out of it thinking, “Yeah, that was about a 60-70% movie.”

@Mojo  

 
Sadly, that might be somewhat true. I saw a newspaper critic put down “Curious George,” (even though it was a surprisingly good family feature) just because it was 2D, (or at least the characters were, as it still had 3D background effects ironically) and called the animation style “outdated.”
 
3D is nice, but sense it’s all it’s all we ever see, and honestly it all is starting to look the same to me, (especially the photorealistic backgrounds, and caricatured human characters) you’d think more people would miss classic 2D pen & ink style animation as it can look more varried. It certainly doesn’t help that CGI/3D is ironically cheaper nowadays, which further makes it harder to get 2D out there.
 
I like how the 2007 Simpsons movie trailer poked fun at how the movie isn’t 3D.

MLP: THE MOVIE >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> CARS 3

But look at that audience score! Honestly, I think most “professional critics” are still firmly stuck in the Animation Age Ghetto. I also can’t help but wonder if Armond White will weigh in, is he going to give the film a positive review just to run contrary to his colleagues like he always does?

@Background Pony #B7D6  
That’s probably because it was to late at night, and you can’t really expect a lot of people to show up at 9:00pm

Well, honest report.  
Went to the 9:15PM showing here with family, theater was damn near empty. Probably 20 or 25 people.  
Family loved it though.

@Mojo  
same as before, I look at it differently.
 
to me, it’s the same argument made for LoZ:OoT, great credits because it was the most revolutionary. As a demo, I could give it 100 without a doubt, it was a pretty damn big deal at the time no doubt, but being a demonstration of capability isn’t the same as being a great game. If that were the case, Doom 3 would’ve been a lot better received.
 
anyway, yeah, I’ll offer to agree to disagree on that.. We’re talking more about our opinions right now and that could get confused with my point about making public reviews as fans, for the general public to read and be informed from.

@toxicitzi
 
I tend to try and compare stuff to stuff it’s similar to, cause I enjoy everything for different reasons and I find it really weird to try and rate say, an action adventure movie to a horror movie on the same scale. That’s just me and how I operate though.
 
To be honest and you might bash me for this, Id take Phantom Menace over Force Awakens. It has tons of flaws but at least it’s not a worse rehash of the first movie in the franchise and nothing made me face palm as hard as fucking Starkiller Base. Im hoping for a hell of a lot more Rogue One which I thought was great and probably objectively the best Star Wars since Empire (even if Subjectively I think I enjoy ROTJ more and ROTS about as much) and less Force Awakens from The Last Jedi.
 
Anyway TPM is fresh at 55% because I think back then 50% was the threshold for “Fresh” rather than 60% and movies from that period have had their status basically grandfathered over.  
Anyway at the time TPM pretty much revolutionized visuals in films. So it got a lot of points for that when it comes to review scores of the era in general. Like we all might hate Jar Jar, hell I do, but he was the first fully motion capture to CGI character ever, which was a big fucking deal in regards to visual effects development.

@Mojo  
Agreed on that last part. Personally, I won’t be thinking about its worth that way, to me this quality and standard remains a constant, meaning, if I liked something in the past enough to call it either a 9, or a 10, my standard for quality will be based on that, I think all movies should aspire to be the best they can be regardless of the time they’re made in.
 
but other than that, as far as rotten tomatoes goes, just because I’m talking more about fans giving higher than realistic ratings, I’m not defending those critics in any way here.. hell, the same site displays critics who made Phantom Menace fresh approval at 55%, not sure how that’s supposed to work with this movie being just 57%, but ok, sure… whatever you say, Rotten tomatoes.

@toxicitzi
 
Compared to other animated movies this year, Id rate it around what I rated the Lego Batman movie, fun but flawed (in this case the pacing was off at points and two of the main characters got really screwed over and might as well have not been there, especially Fluttershy, in Lego Batman movies case it took the self-aware nature from the Lego Movie and pushed it further than it really needed to be pushed and so lost quite a lot of the charm the first lego movie had)
 
Storywise I was fine with it for the most part, it felt like a classical animated adventure movie plot, which yeah might be a bit generic but I like that kind of thing.
 
Actually wow thinking about it there weren’t many major animated films this year. There was Cars 3 too, but I haven’t seen that yet so I can’t judge, other than hope that it was better than 2.
 
 
Anyway my main issue with a lot of the reviews is that they fail to articulate the pros and cons, which is what a review is supposed to do, the ones I mentioned feel ether tainted by just generally disliking bright cheery movies or just anger about it not being what THEY wanted it to be.

@Mojo  
Comparatively to other movies out there, 7-8 seems a bit high, don’t you think? It’s certainly what fans gave EQG 1 on Rotten Tomatoes, if you will have a look there and I’m saying it now, if we talk shit about critics, let’s also be fair in talking shit about fans giving their own reviews too.  
I can say that this movie is about a 6-7, I’d say that would be fine, but having not seen it yet, if the movie has a fairly terrible story, it deserves no more than a 6 at the very best, only salvaged to a 7 by the characters, animation production and some form of entertainment.
 
Basically, I would give it a 7, but reluctantly so and after I watched it, because I’m thinking about this as a theatrical release, not as an episode of the show that fans and avid viewers of the show watch. If that’s not fair, all I have to wonder is, why was the movie released on theaters? why were any of the EQG movies released to theaters for that matter, other than to make money and try to hit it with the public?

My prediction is still on track.  

I think most of the critic reviews are biased

Yet more proof that critics have no idea how to objectively criticize anything. Most negative reviews have been from people complaining that it’s not what they want, despite the synopsis having been available for months telling us what to expect.
 
Giving something a bad rating because you don’t like it is not the same thing as giving it a bad rating because it’s bad.

@Megas75
 
I think yeah a 7-8 is what it deserves… Id be fine with it getting average reviews though if it weren’t for how strange some of the negative reviews are. Like Roger Ebert.com and AV Club’s main issue is basically they went the happy bright route without tearing it down and deconstructing it. Why on earth would anyone walk into this movie expecting or wanting that.
 
and IGN’s review which was instead of reviewing the movie as it was, was basically a fan complaining that Discord wasn’t in the movie, that there was too much action for the show’s message of friendship, that there were anthromorphic animals, with barely any actual talking about the movie as it is.

@Background Pony #24F7
 
There’s an insane bias toward 3D animation that exist nowadays among critics. If this was Pixar style 3D you can bet the score would be at least 10-15% higher.

Im really confused as to why the LA times review brought it down to negative, that review wasn’t particularly negative at all. It was basically just “this movie sets out to be like a saturdary morning cartoon, and is like a saturday morning cartoon”

@HydroSpanner  
Another reason I dislike that site.