I meant completely to watch this movie over the weekend but just kept putting it off every day for no reason other than my bed felt really comfy. After it took the Best Documentary award at the 83rd Academy Awards – a.k.a. The Oscars – this past weekend I guessed it was the final nudge that I needed to make me give the film a watch.
In 2008 the world’s economy was in the worst state it’s ever been in. Charles Ferguson decides to take a closer look at how and why the US, and by that right the world’s, economy ended up where it did.
This movie is what you think every documentary is. It’s information. The film decides to sit you down for an hour and forty or so minutes and tell you the facts of what happened over the last decade and more and show with pretty much certainty as to why you’re without a job today and why it’s even harder for you to get another job. It takes time, patience and your full attention to not be lost in the numerous figures, terms and tons of names thrown at you from interviews and documents that you will be viewing while watching the film. However, with that said the documentary still remains one of the most well put together pieces of commentary and analysis on the economy and why it failed and what’s being done to change it.
While I don’t read in depth every article published in the Financial Times I still think that I had the general idea of what really went down before watching this movie, but to say that this movie didn’t enlighten me on a lot of the bigger systematic problems that exist. The indepth historical approach that the documentary took which allowed me to see not only who made these decisions but for which biased reason was so well crafted that you can’t help but understand why this movie won the award for Best Documentary.
Where the documentary genre is made or broken is in the editing. This movie is so well put together that you almost feel jealous that someone had to sit through, what I assume, was a hundred hours of shot interview footage and added on screen graphics with documents and images. To know that someone is that good at being able to make sure that a beginning, middle and end are so clearly defined from all of these very corroborative interviews from financial experts and moguls makes me happy to be a film lover.
I know that documentaries aren’t for everyone, and if you’re someone who’s written off documentaries because you much prefer to read the Wikipedia page than have someone read it to you for two hours then don’t watch this movie. However, for those of you who can manage the runtime and are somewhat interested in learning about how you’re being messed up on a daily basis or still lost as to how you went from where you were financially ten years ago to now then this is the movie for you.
IMDB says 8.2/10
Rotten Tomatoes says 98%
I say 7.5/10