There's a theme and limited time to convey it. If a movie is meant to be a 2-hour action movie, you expect breathtaking scenes, and a fast-paced story, more than careful character building, long and deep discussions, and emotional scenes. If the movie try to do both and ends up with half action scenes and half static scenes, it won't feel as exciting and people will be confused or bored, unless it's a very long movie or mini-series that can afford that. The same goes with a psychological movie; if it is drowned in action scenes, people will find it superficial.
I don't quite get the "you expect" statement. Are you telling me you have the authority to determine what people expect? I hope we can agree that you can only really know what you - yourself - expect, right?
You can try to guess what other people expect, but I'm pretty confident in saying that will be very different from person to person.
As for me, personally, I try not to expect in general. Of course, I will fail in that - and especially when something is hyped up to a significant degree, and I'm aware of the hype.
But I don't go into a movie thinking it needs to do certain specific things before I'll be happy with it.
I think you could say I'm more of a reactive movie-watcher in that way.
I respond to what the movie is doing in a dynamic way - and I try to immerse myself as much as possible.
Some things tend to aid my immersion - and some things tend to ruin it.
If Top Gun had successfully communicated to me that it wasn't meant to be taken seriously - and that I was to ignore poor character building and not invest in the characters themselves on any meaningful level - that might have worked.
Though, I have to say, I tend to dislike movies of all kinds if they don't have at least a few interesting or compelling characters in them. That's probably why I tend to be hard on certain movies that are otherwise quite popular, including - say - the recent Prey or something like Avatar.
I can't really enjoy a spectacle movie if I'm not invested in the characters, sadly.
So I think that if you compare a product to the wrong expectations, it's not relevant because you are looking for elements that were not meant to be there in the first place.
I personally think it's unfortunate when a movie, or any kind of entertainment, requires a specific set of expectations to provide what it's trying to provide.
That, to me, is sort of like saying to people "you're not playing the game right, so of course you're not enjoying it". Like they need to adapt and change themselves before they understand how great something is.
To me, that's like discounting the individual and the preferences of the individual - like they're not relevant or reasonable.
So, I strongly disagree with you about relevance and I think it's unreasonable to require the "right expectations" to accept a differing opinion as valid.
It feels like you're saying that an opinion is only relevant or valid - if the holder of it first accepts your perception of what the movie was trying to do - and then disliked it with the "right" expectations.
I hope and sort of suspect I'm wrong about that - as that would make you incredibly arrogant
But that's what it sounds like.
I see them as a bunch of people who want to be the best (and often think they are) but wish to appear cool at the same time. So there's some part of trying to ridicule direct competitors while not antagonizing admirers, which makes for awkward humour outbursts - something not uncommon in any community. When they're not in a group, they tend to be more natural and relaxed.
So I didn't see any ambiguity, but I tend not to analyze it too much in that context because the focus is indeed not on complex characters. It's certainly not perfect in that regard but there's so little time allocated on relationships that it leaves a good margin for imagination.
I didn't see any ambiguity about the characters themselves, I was talking about the movies as a whole and the tone they seem to be going for.
