(Only critical sensations like Inside Out, Mission: Impossible – Rogue Nation and Spy scored better.) And if good reviews translate into strong word-of-mouth from audiences, SOC could have serious commercial legs, with the hardcore N.W.A fans that came out opening weekend being replaced in subsequent weeks by the uninitiated who just want to see a good movie.Īlthough N.W.A haven’t released an album of new material in 24 years, its influence is everywhere, and not just in music. The movie’s 88% fresh rating is far higher than this summer’s biggest hits Jurassic World, Avengers: Age of Ultron and Minions. Compton clearly benefited, earning some of the strongest reviews of the season for a wide studio release. (Critics savaged the Transformers movies, and they still all made beaucoup bank.) But a high rating on Rotten Tomatoes can convince viewers on the fence to give a film a shot. The conventional wisdom is that reviews don’t matter when it comes to summer blockbusters. Watching scenes of the band being victimized by thuggish police officers, it felt queasily reminiscent of recent videos of Walter Scott and Eric Garner dying at the hands of law enforcement. Nostalgic rap fans may have been drawn to the time period, but N.W.A’s lyrics about police brutality, poverty and racism couldn’t be more relevant in 2015. Nonetheless, it was impossible to miss how the climate that provoked a song like “Fuck tha Police” remains distressingly alive and well in the Ferguson era.
The uncomfortable parallels to current racial tension were unmistakable.Īll credit to Universal, which released the film, for not exploiting the obvious connections between the movie’s late-Eighties/early-Nineties racial tensions and our own in its marketing.
And that language was very much shaped by N.W.A.ģ.
“Nineties hip-hop in particular really shaped what became the common pop cultural language that we all speak,” Dope director Rick Famuyiwa told Rolling Stone earlier this summer. And it’s also important to remember that hip-hop itself has been looking back of late: Whether it’s Eminem’s 2013 single “Berzerk,” which heavily sampled Licensed to Ill-era Beastie Boys, or the Bush I-era kids of the Sundance hit Dope, the past is very much present. Maybe that’s why Compton didn’t: It told a new nostalgic story rather than simply recycling an old one. What’s funny, though, is that they’ve been busts across the board, with new versions of Robocop, Poltergeist, Red Dawn and Nightmare on Elm Street all underperforming. Hollywood has been in the midst of a 1980s revival for a few years now, remaking many of its iconic films from the Reagan-to-Rubik’s Cube age.
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