Scarlett Johansson's Ray Gunn opens at 91% on Rotten Tomatoes after its BFI London premiere — the reviews praise everything except the script

Ray Gunn had its world premiere at the 70th BFI London Film Festival on October 10, the review embargo lifted, and Brad Bird's animated sci-fi noir debuted in the low 90s on Rotten Tomatoes — 93% on the first 15 reviews, settling at 91% as the count grew to 34. For Scarlett Johansson, who voices the multimedia star Venus Nova opposite Sam Rockwell's private eye, it's her best-reviewed film in five years. For Bird, it keeps a streak alive: across seven features, Tomorrowland remains his only Rotten score.

The number is high, and the consensus underneath it is lopsided in a specific way. Critics agree on the surface — Metropia, the film's gigantic retro-future city as imagined from 1939, Michael Giacchino's jazz score, Rockwell's swagger, the action. TheWrap went as far as "visually stunning, thematically rich masterpiece." The arguments start when reviews reach the writing:

• Variety: the characters "want for texture and soul," though the visual and sonic delights compensate.
• The Hollywood Reporter, in the loudest pan: "a blandly palatable jumble of sci-fi and neo-noir clichés."
• The A.V. Club called the plotting confounding and the alien-segregation parable half-baked.
• IGN, even inside an 8/10, said the detective story runs long and the film raises bigotry as a theme without digging into it.
• The dissent: Little White Lies praised the Bird–Matthew Robbins screenplay as "a thing of pristine beauty," so the script has at least one passionate defender.

The split is worth watching rather than dismissing, because of how the score was built. The 93% debut came from the 15 critics in the friendliest possible room — a festival premiere of a 30-year passion project — and it has already drifted two points as wider outlets weighed in. Between now and December there's a Montclair Film Festival screening on October 17, a select theatrical release on December 4, and the Netflix drop on December 18, each wave bringing critics who didn't applaud in the room.

Festival-debut Rotten Tomatoes scores are a poll of the people who chose to be there. The real number arrives with the people who didn't.

The 30-year detour

Bird conceived Ray Gunn in the 1990s at Turner Feature Animation, shelved it to make The Iron Giant, and negotiated to keep the rights through The Incredibles, Ratatouille and Mission: Impossible money. Skydance Animation finally made it, Netflix is releasing it, and the December 4 theatrical window plus the festival circuit is the recognizable shape of a Best Animated Feature campaign — Deadline's Pete Hammond already called it ripe for the category. Johansson, asked in London why she signed on, kept her answer to five words: "What attracted me was Brad." After thirty years, the pitch apparently still works in person.

Previously we wrote: Rode to Ruin: cast, plot and release window for director Michael Keaton's western — Morgan Freeman plays an outlaw who's losing his memory