The Corporation
The Corporation is a good example of a political documentary that is free of the emotion-evoking propaganda prevalent in many high-grossing docs these days. The filmmaker’s level-headed approach results in a seemingly well-balanced (albeit decidedly leftist) informational film that is easy to hate, but hard to argue with. It has enough corporate blunders to make even the most calloused business student shake his head. The revelation that 9-11 was a welcomed blessing for Wall Street traders might even make you wish that the planes had crashed into the NYSE instead of the Twin Towers.
The Corporation’s Achilles heel is the massive scope of the subject. From Noam Chomsky to advertising executives to Howard Zinn to the head of the Shell corporation to a carpet tycoon to Michael Moore, the interviewees run the gamut. I counted at least 17 different talking heads in the film (no doubt there are more) and each interview excerpt is so short that you don’t really get a sense of the individual viewpoints represented. I’m sure that the filmmakers included this range of voices under the banner of equal representation, but keeping up with who is saying what is a bit daunting for the viewer. Also, the Monsanto “Posilac cover-up” story seemed too large a tangent to blend with the rest of the film. Perhaps that should have been relegated to a separate mini-documentary to be included on the DVD.
As with most political documentaries, chances are your like or dislike of this film will depend heavily on the political views you walk into the theater with. For those of us who question consumerism, The Corporation is a re-affirming and eye-opening experience. Through the filmmaker’s eyes, we get a glimpse of a world not unlike The Matrix: a place where corporations have covered the earth in such a thick layer of advertisements that we have no idea what life could be like without them.