Bezos

First off, this was not a good film. Nothing new here at all for anyone who's watched TV like Silicon Valley and other startup related content. The direction is clumsy and flawed and there isn't enough interesting going on to make it worth watching. Of course if you want to learn how Jeff Bezos thinks of himself and his life, by all means watch this movie because it beats spending days reading a book on the topic.

But there is nothing adversarial at all going on here either. In order to become a multi-billionaire and own a monopolistic corporation like Amazon, many people and small businesses have to be hurt along the way, not to mention the environment. What would have made this movie interesting would have been the portrayal of how Bezos personally dealt with issues like overworked employees, the unionization (or attempts) of various warehouse/distro facilities, the lobbying efforts and countless dollars spent buying US government representatives and senators, the foray by Amazon's hosting and data divisions into extra-constitutional government surveillance of Americans by way of taxpayer funded contracts with the Defense Department/Pentagon/NSA, the way Bezos decided how to game a lot of Amazon sellers out of revenue through various algorithmic quackery or straight up ripping off ideas (one wonders if Bezos had any role in the Amazon Basics brand that offers knockoffs of already fine products), etc.

Instead we get a hagiography with a little nod thrown in for his ex-wife. We don't get to learn why he decided to become "buff" or the efforts he is making in biological sciences/cybernetics/etc. To try to live forever, his competition with Elon Musk regarding the aforementioned government contracts, the race to mars, or any of it.

Two word summary of this movie: Pointless Hagiography.

I struggle with how a man worth over $150 BILLION has a low budget movie made about him. It's disappointing and embarrassing. This movie should have had "A" list actors and actresses, popular music from that era, and more depth to the plot. Maybe I'm just not aware of the dynamics between billionaires and Hollywood...is there a "don't cross this line" between them or something? I would imagine that they rub elbows so I'm seriously confused why this movie wasn't made in blockbuster fashion. Instead it's cheesy with terrible acting and a terrible ending. I'm a huge Amazon fan so it feels personal that Jeff didn't invest more time, talent and money into telling me his origin story.

First of all, I acknowledge that making anything except a straight factual biography on Bezos is an attempt in futility as there's no way it will reach people.

Bezos is a polarising figure as his story as a person equals that of Amazon, with all that it represents to different people: a success story, a villanous corporation, a pointless foray into commercial space flight, worker rights suppression, a consumer godsend, environmental disaster and so on.

Something that brushes past these topics having any other reason except factual authenticity is going to get a pushback.

To make up for dodging what makes Bezos polarising, the movie would have to be an exercise in art: acting, story writing, a human side of Bezos, going deep into personal issues, the make of the man and so on.

Long story short, this movie fails across the board. The acting is all over the place, I'd call it decent but decent is just not enough to save this. Cinematography is good ... but buried under bland writing and a story that brings nothing to the table.

There's really nothing here as everything that could potentially make people curious is just glossed over, including Bezos' divorce despite the fact that his wife was also a driving force behind his Amazon empire building. This point alone is unforgivable.

I was shocked to see that of all the ways Bezos could have showed his story to the world, this was the one he'd chosen.

The story isn't bad, of course, but the movie seems to be so poorly executed, from how it was directed, written and the acting.

The film talks about how Amazon started, from its very beginning. The nice part is to see his ex wife's input in the very early days, the amount of dedication they put into transforming an ideia into the company that it is today and the difficulties they faced. No doubt it is an inspiring story.... Just it was surprising to me that it seemed like a very low budget, weird project.

This slow paced movie tells the story of how Jeff Bezos founded Amazon. While rhe story itself is increadibly flat, it did manage to keep me interested throughout the movie, knowing how big Bezos and Amazon will become.

The production value of the movie is very low, but that's not the biggest problem for a character driven drama. The real problem is horrible acting and directing. Some moments seem taken from a Hallmark movie from the 90s, and many other moments are robotic and staged.

Overall it's a pretty weak film, but can be useful to pass the time on a slow night in, when you might be too tired to watch anything actually engaging.