Taika Waititi has a new theory about film criticism, and the timing is something to behold. His adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun opened to the sound of crickets and empty seats, and rather than sit quietly with that, he's decided the people who noticed are the problem. As Geeks and Gamers reports, the man behind two Thor movies and a handful of diminishing returns is now telling anyone who'll listen that critics just don't matter anymore.

Funny how that works. I've been watching this particular dance for decades, and the choreography never changes. Nobody in Hollywood declares critics irrelevant after a hit. They declare critics irrelevant after a flop, always, and the flop is never the director's fault. It's the algorithm, the audience, the weather, the mean people with notebooks. When Thor: Ragnarok made a pile of money, Waititi could not get enough of the praise. Now that the box office has stopped returning his calls, suddenly the whole profession of sitting in the dark and writing down what you saw is obsolete.

Let me say something in my own defense, since apparently somebody has to. Critics were never the ones who made your movie open soft. Word of mouth did that. Audiences did that. People who bought a ticket, texted their friends, and said don't bother. Critics can't kill a movie people love; the summers of Jaws and Star Wars proved that when every stuffed shirt in America predicted both would fail. What critics can do is notice patterns, and the pattern with Waititi's recent work is that the swagger outran the substance somewhere around 2019 and never caught back up.

There was a real talent here once, and I'll say that plainly. Hunt for the Wilderpeople is a genuinely lovely picture, warm and strange in the best way. But somewhere along the line he became a brand, the quirky guy, the one studios hired to make their products seem irreverent, and the irreverence curdled into shtick. By the time he was winking at the camera through a franchise picture, you could feel the marketing department high-fiving in the editing bay. Audiences feel that too. They always do.

And now Klara and the Sun, an adaptation of a quiet, aching Ishiguro novel, lands with a thud, and the response is to shrug at the entire critical profession. A man who reads the reviews and then announces he doesn't read the reviews is not showing confidence. My mother had a word for that, and it wasn't a nice one.

The truth is critics are more relevant than they've been in years, just not the ones Waititi is thinking of. The woke-scoring sites, the YouTube reviewers, the regular folks posting their ticket stubs and their honest reactions, the audience has built its own critical class because it stopped trusting the people with column inches. Hollywood hated that development, called it review bombing, complained about it in trade papers. But it's the same hunger that's always existed: people want to know if the picture's any good before they spend the evening and the mortgage payment on popcorn. We just cut out the middleman with the film degree.

So no, Taika, the critics didn't sink your movie. The movie sank your movie. Critics are merely the messengers, and shooting messengers has been out of fashion since the Greeks wrote it down. They also wrote down what happens to men too proud to hear bad news. Ishiguro would know; he put it in several of his books. Might have been worth reading the rest of the novel before filming it.