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By the end of Gamestop: Rise of the Player, I wanted one thing to be explained to me: Why did they think GameStop (this is the correct spelling) was a good investment against all industry and common sense standards? It sort of answers this without really getting into the definable details, but the movie has a far more concerning problem that is 100% unforgivable: they use the voice of Tucker Carlson, far right grifter and terrible human being, more than once to hear ‘voice of authority’ pull quotes.
There is absolutely no excuse for that, and the only thing he really says is that the big dogs in the financial industry are screwing people over, but it leaves out the frequent anti-Semitic dogwhistling that often accompanies his tirades. So I must grade this movie as an ‘Incomplete’ because they did not do all of their work.
The documentary Gamestop: Rise of the Player comes from director Jonah Tullis, known for the okay video game documentary Console Wars. This movie repeats the pixelated animation and artwork that actually made sense there, and reuses it in ways that are sometimes cute but other times off-putting. All of the main talking heads of the movie (which are the main investors and researchers that started the GameStop investment craze) are given distracting, unflattering pixelated animated avatars that are like someone was shining a harsh light on them. It’s an odd choice, maybe because they already had those pixel art connections?
The movie paints a line between everyday folk struggling to get by and the big investment firms that callously play with ‘shorting’ stocks by betting on failure. It’s easy to paint those in the finance world as villains, and some certainly are, but the movie then goes a step further and literally calls the investors trying to ‘squeeze’ and hit back against the investment firms ‘heroes’. The movie is entirely unbiased in this way and borderline hagiographic (or maybe not borderline at all).
The actual people involved are mostly interesting subjects though, people taken from a wide swatch of life and backgrounds — some are the people that started beating the drum for GameStop, and others that were simply the early adopters and cheerleaders. These people aren’t so bad to listen to, but the movie only vaguely explains the ‘why’.
As I understood it, the reasons are the innovations of new chairman Ryan Cohen, and his big talk to investors and new executive hires, while partnering with Microsoft with some amount of revenue sharing. What is only lightly hinted at is the sinister, paranoid side of it all, like the bizarre worship of Elon Musk or how GameStop is planning to build an NFT platform to become the ‘Amazon of gaming’, which is a horrifying thought in multiple ways (as NFTs are terrible).
I don’t have a problem with the subjects of the movie, most of whom definitely risked their livelihoods on betting for the stars, but the investment world as it intersects with the Internet is rife with cultish behavior and dangerous advice. This movie is unapologetically in favor of the small scale investors, but it doesn’t really touch as highly on the firms that also benefited from the investments — and based on looking at some of the GameStop and investment Internet forums, I don’t know that they really know that this movie fetes their efforts and are prematurely donking on it. Maybe that’ll change whenever this thing is on streaming. If they had simply cut out the Tucker Carlson lines, I wouldn’t mind people paying for it — but I cannot in good conscience support the movie as it stands.
Gamestop: Rise of the Player has a run time of 1 hour 34 minutes and is not rated.
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