Life is often scarier than fiction

Rating: 8/10 (28 June 2020)

The 2007-2008 financial crisis was a dark time for many people across the world. It should go without saying that economics is an extremely complex subject that no single person fully understands. It can seem kind of far away now, given recent events, but it was a huge deal at the time. And despite that, a lot of people still do not understand it because, again, economics is complicated. So how do you put a topic like into a format the average layman can understand? Why you turn it into a black comedy film of course! Enter, The Big Short.
A comedy movie about people in high society doing bad things for money is not exactly a new concept. Every few years we see one of these, like The Big Short or The Wolf on Wall Street. And they are as hilarious as they are terrifying. I like watching horror movies, I've seen more than 1,000 of those things, and these films are scarier than anything in the horror category.
Now, you always have to take these "based on a true story" movies with a grain of salt. But The Big Short was surprisingly good about this. Not 100% good, but better than most other films. The big thing is that the movie portrays the characters as if they were the only ones to see the financial crisis coming. But a lot of people back then knew there was a housing bubble. The thing that made these people special was figuring out it would happen soon. And the movie makes a big point of them researching the housing market and realizing how rotten the banking industry's system is. It turns out that people buying houses they couldn't afford with money they didn't have from the banks that weren't paying attention was a bad thing. Who knew?
And at the end of the day, you cannot really argue that the protagonists are good people. They are all banking on the economy to collapse and have set themselves up to profit from the disaster. But the flipside of that is: what else were they supposed to do? The goal of any business, banks included, is to make more money constantly. Gotta keep those shareholders happy, baby. They probably would have been laughed out of the room even if they could have gotten some banking or government bigwigs to listen to their argument. The lack of action against the bankers following the financial crisis seems to back that up.
Anyway, this is a film everyone should watch since it is a very important piece of recent history. And it's just, you know, a good movie. Great actors, a strong script, and a portrayal of real-world events that will keep you up at night. Good times.