GameStop: Rise of the Players: An Overlong Cable News Special

Documentaries are an important part of the cinematic tradition. They can expose the worst of humanity, introduce viewers to things that they have never seen before, or just explain something that is complex in a way that is easy to understand. A documentary does not need to be unbiased in the way that traditional news reporting should be, considering it is usually designed to reflect the filmmaker’s world view. That said, there is such a thing as too biased, and biased to the point where it is transparent. That line is crossed in GameStop: Rise of the Players.

Last year GameStop had its stock skyrocket after activist investors bought the stock en masse when hedge funds attempted a short sell on GameStock’s stock. This was because a firm that attempts a short sell on a stock stands to lose a near infinite amount of money should the stock price rise rather than fall (this is much more eloquently explained in the movie). Establishment figures within the financial industry were quick to attempt to paint those who were buying the stocks as everything from “anarchists” to “trolls.” This documentary seems more focused on correcting that misconception, rather than explaining what happened systemically leading to this issue.

There is a broad conversation to be had about the role of hedge funds, what powers hedge funds have, what role the media of finances has in the public perception of individual investors, and what role the financial institutions have to allow or prevent the individual investors from doing what large firms can do on their own. These are concerns that have come to light since the 2008 Financial Crisis and have yet to be rectified in any meaningful way. Despite being a dramatized version of events, The Big Short does a much better job explaining how the housing market collapsed than this documentary does explaining the financial systems involved with the conflicts in this incident.

The other problem with this documentary is that the issue at hand is still not resolved. GameStop’s stock is still at $97 and similar stocks that were short squeezed by the subreddit are still at a high (AMC Theaters is still at $15 which may not be an all-time high but is still substantially higher than the three-dollar price it was at before all this). Investigations are still ongoing and there are still lawsuits pending. Whether or not any substantive change happens as a result of these events is up in the air. That’s not to say that a documentary should not happen at this point, it is to say that if someone is going to make the documentary about something like this, it is more important to point to the issues in the system rather than fixing the collective reputation of those who partook in this event.

Final Rating: 7.5/10