20 Terrible Movies That Do NOT Deserve Their Fresh Rotten Tomatoes Scores
12. The Tree Of Life
Score: 84% (Average Score: 8.20/10)
Consensus: Terrence Malick's singularly deliberate style may prove unrewarding for some, but for patient viewers, Tree of Life is an emotional as well as visual treat.
OK, maybe it's a little harsh to call The Tree of Life a terrible film, since its ambition and visual brilliance are impossible to deny, but for many viewers it was certainly a terrible viewing. Be honest: how many people do you know that actually liked this movie? Not many, most likely.
Among many viewers it's been a distinctly polarizing viewing and that's more than understandable. After all, this film is often far too weird and generalized to really reach the level of thematic resonance it's aiming for, and quite frankly it's so ludicrously self-indulgent and up-itself that it is often beyond parody.
If Friedberg and Seltzer, those dreadful spoof directors who have thankfully largely disappeared now, ever made a parody film called 'Art House Movie', it would probably look a lot like The Tree of Life. That's definitely not a compliment.
Given the generally flawed, emotionally distant nature of this movie and given the widely polarised response, you'd expect the Rotten Tomatoes score to reflect this, but no; the score is very high indeed.
This is another one that's just really, really hard to explain, especially when many other recent art-house films that were far more accessible and overall better than this - including Spring Breakers, Cloud Atlas and Suspiria - got far lower scores.
Deserved Score: 50-59%.