The film follows Spurlock as he seeks out funding for the movie, which is ostensibly about product placement. However, the plot gets dull as we already know the ending, that the movie gets funding and gets made. There is no arc, no interesting advances. And talking to industry hired guns (i.e. analysts and advertising folks) gets droll and repetitive. So, the movie was simply dull and uninteresting after a while.
I had hoped that, like most documentaries where the star is the producer/director, there would be two concurrent story lines running throughout - one with the contrived plot of finding sponsors, the other with a great inner-workings of the beast sort of thing where we learn something about product placement. Instead we are shown a dozen 3-second product placement clips and told that it's everpresent. This is not new information to anyone with a working brain stem. We are not educated on the topic. It's a real shame. I'll give an example of this done correctly - most any Michael Moore film. There's the "plot" of Moore going here, doing that. But there's also an entire portion of the film where you learn a lot about the topic of the film. Be it gun control, or health care, you come away with more knowledge and certainly at least a rudimentary understanding of the broad system at work. This movie, you know nothing more than you went in with, other than you can monitor someone's brain with an fMRI machine whilst they watch movie trailers.
A serious miss, and a serious missed opportunity for Spurlock. This could have been fantastic, but his personal role in the movie took over and destroyed the entire concept. Pass.
I had hoped that, like most documentaries where the star is the producer/director, there would be two concurrent story lines running throughout - one with the contrived plot of finding sponsors, the other with a great inner-workings of the beast sort of thing where we learn something about product placement. Instead we are shown a dozen 3-second product placement clips and told that it's everpresent. This is not new information to anyone with a working brain stem. We are not educated on the topic. It's a real shame. I'll give an example of this done correctly - most any Michael Moore film. There's the "plot" of Moore going here, doing that. But there's also an entire portion of the film where you learn a lot about the topic of the film. Be it gun control, or health care, you come away with more knowledge and certainly at least a rudimentary understanding of the broad system at work. This movie, you know nothing more than you went in with, other than you can monitor someone's brain with an fMRI machine whilst they watch movie trailers.
A serious miss, and a serious missed opportunity for Spurlock. This could have been fantastic, but his personal role in the movie took over and destroyed the entire concept. Pass.