Austin Butler's Best Movie, According To Rotten Tomatoes
Austin Butler is making a name for himself not just as a talented up-and-coming star, but as a man with a penchant for weird voices. Much like his "The Bikeriders" co-star Tom Hardy (a man who's given us a smorgasbord of weird voices in his time), Butler is showing promise as a master of what Hardy termed the "vocal silhouette." His "Dune: Part Two" voice simply demands further examination, for example, but it was his complete transformation for Baz Luhrman's "Elvis" that gave us the most significant vocal tone. In fact, Butler basically reinvented himself as the King of Rock n' Roll for the movie. After a five-month audition that was unlike any other for "Elvis," he disappeared into the character for three years and claimed to lose touch with who he really was by the end of it.
Still, all that dedication seems to have been worth it. Butler began his transformation from Disney child star to serious leading man with his supporting role as Charles "Tex" Watson in Quentin Tarantino's "Once Upon A Time in Hollywood." But it's inarguable that everyone knows the man's name because of his role in "Elvis." Not only did Butler win a Golden Globe and a BAFTA Award for his performance, he was also nominated for a Best Actor Oscar and immediately cemented himself as a megastar. Not bad for a kid that got his start with an uncredited role on "Ned's Declassified School Survival Guide."
It's a shame, then, that despite all that effort and all the plaudits he received, Rotten Tomatoes considers "Elvis" Butler's fourth-best film. What's number one? A film that required a lot less commitment from Butler.
Austin Butler's highest-rated movie on Rotten Tomatoes
Film fans know how Rotten Tomatoes works, but it's worth reiterating just to remind ourselves of what the site is, and what it isn't. This may come as a shock for those of us who rely on the Tomatometer to whittle down the unending cavalcade of streaming "content" on offer, but Rotten Tomatoes is not the final word on whether a film is actually good or not. This is the site that contends there are only two perfect sci-fi movies ever made and that Sean Connery's best film is "Darby O'Gill and the Little People." But thinking about which films RT considers "best" is somewhat of a misapprehension of the site's purpose.
The review aggregator does just that: aggregates other people's opinions on films and TV shows, producing a percentage score based on whether those opinions are positive or negative. So, while the percentage scores we see emblazoned across the top of a film's RT page may seem like some sort of purely objective representation of a film's quality, behind them are opinions as subjective as anything ever was.
With that in mind, when RT shows "Dune: Part Two" as Austin Butler's "best" film, all that means is that a percentage of the total critics who reviewed that movie liked it. It tells you nothing about the number of critics who actually reviewed the film, or whether the positive reviews were gushing or just good enough to avoid the dreaded green splat. In the case of the bleak blockbuster that is "Dune: Part Two," 92% of 434 reviewers liked the movie — and so they should. "Dune: Part Two" was an epic sci-fi drama took some serious dedication to pull off. But is it fair to say that this is Butler's best movie?
Is Dune: Part Two really Butler's best?
In "Dune: Part Two" Austin Butler plays Feyd-Rautha, a merciless Harkonen assassin and nephew of Baron Vladimir Harkonen (Stellan Skarsgård). Butler is great in the role, which required him to don a bald cap and prosthetics to play the pallid Siridar-Baron. The actor also adopted yet another idiosyncratic vocal tone for the film, which further helped him project the cold ruthlessness that propels Feyd.
But Butler also established a boundary for "Dune" that he didn't have with "Elvis." Essentially, the 32-year-old stopped short of taking his character with him after the cameras stopped rolling, which, considering he started to forget who he was after "Elvis," was probably for the best. What's more, although Butler had a big role in "Part Two," he was by no means the star. Rather, he was a significant part of one of the most impressive ensemble casts yet gathered this decade, sharing the spotlight with Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya, Christopher Walken, Stellan Skarsgård, Javier Bardem, and more.
As such, it's not fair to think of "Dune: Part Two" as Butler's best film, even if Rotten Tomatoes says otherwise. RT ranks "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" (86%) and Butler's most recent film, "The Bikeriders" (81%), above "Elvis" (77%), and while "Dune: Part Two" and "Once Upon a Time" are hardly "Austin Butler films," "The Bikeriders" and "Elvis" very much are. Which is to say that Butler's motorcycle club drama is rated higher than the film for which he almost lost himself over three years of disappearing into his character. If RT scores were more important than they are, then, this would surely bother the man. As it stands, I have a feeling he's too busy being one of Hollywood's most exciting young stars to care.