Product: Startup.Com (2001)
Rating: 2.0
an empty fairy tale
I couldn't wait to see this movie, and was I ever disappointed, as I yawned my way through most of it. The movie covers more than a year in the rise and fall of an internet startup, and does so with the assumption that the audience has a short attention span and won't be interested in the details. And so, there were complex interactions in several areas that were central to the story but which were dealt with superficially. First, the dealings between the company and the venture capitalists. A lot of screen time was devoted to the search for money, but I can't say it shed any light, for me, on how they actually got the money. Next, there was the buyout of one of the founders, with negotiations that got pretty ugly. Never did I get what precipitated the buyout or why things got so ugly. Then, there was a pivotal confrontation between the two remaining founders. I sat staring at the screen wondering, what are the issues here? What is happening to this company? Do I even care? No, the filmmakers gave me no reason to care about either the company or the people. There were a lot of people treating each other badly while saying to the camera how relationships are the most important thing in their life.There was no narration, little explanation, quick edits that left with me with more questions and no answers. There were captions showing the growth of the company. 20 employees. 75 employees. 200 employees. And suddenly, near the end, empty cubicles and a caption that said 50 employees. What caused the sudden dropoff? Was it the beginning of the bubble bursting for internet stocks? Or was it that their competitors had, technically, better websites? I really couldn't tell. Maybe the point of the movie was merely to entertain, and not to elucidate what happened to one company during the internet mania. But I wasn't even entertained.