‘Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga’ Review: Or How Reddit Gave a Sucker Punch to Wall Street

The world of investing is not really an accessible one. Trading stocks has always been seen as a very complicated and risky enterprise for those who don’t have the capital they need to act as a cushion whenever an investment goes wrong. There are so many details and factors that go along with making a good investment that, effectively, it often feels more like making a bet than making a sound and logical decision. Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga is a new documentary available on Netflix that offers a window into the unprecedented GameStop event that shook the investment world.

Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga is a three-part docuseries directed by Theo Love. The series tells the story of the GameStop rise in stock that occurred at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. During this rise in stocks, social media and forums on the internet like Reddit started to increase the price of GameStop, the video game retail company. The rise in the price of the stocks made some people make a lot of money, but it also made the people of Wall Street mad, as they were shorting the company, and now they were losing millions every day.

Films like Adam Mckay’s The Big Short have opened the eyes of mainstream audiences to what really happens behind the scenes of million-dollar investment funds. It is complicated and confusing, but also fascinating and exciting, as you see people basically throwing money around as if there was no tomorrow. However, as much interesting and exciting as the subject is, the consequences of such gamification of the market can be ruthless. Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga really speaks to that sector of the audience and gives an overall good look at how no one really knows what they are doing.

The documentary is made in a very standard way. You will not find any sort of new filmmaking technique or anything that really speaks volumes about this being a high-budget documentary. It is very much made in the vein of some YouTube documentaries. We might have to say that some documentaries on YouTube are even better, but, nevertheless, Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga works by delivering information that some people alien to the subject might have never heard of. However, if you are looking for something to go really deep into the subject, then this isn’t for you.

The interviews are fun, and it is clear that Love and his filmmaking team are taking a note from the Big Short by delivering the information using the best examples and the best visual aids they can come up with. So, if you have never heard anything about investing, you might leave this documentary knowing a bit more than before, and that is always good. The interviews are done in a very casual way, so sometimes it can feel like none of the interviewees are taking the subject seriously enough.

Should a subject like his be taken seriously? Of course, it doesn’t mean that you can’t laugh and make jokes, but sometimes the documentary leans too much into the fun part of things, and the entire discussion ends up feeling a bit shallow. The fact that the docuseries couldn’t really do interviews with some of the most important players in the story also feels like a cop-out and makes the entire project feel a bit incomplete.

The docuseries has also made a really strange structural decision. This series runs for just three episodes, and they basically amount to a little over two hours. Why was this divided into episodes and not delivered as one big documentary? It feels weird and unnecessary. Every time an episode ends, and you see the length of the next episode, you really start to realize that maybe they needed to deliver a series for Netflix, but they didn’t have one at hand.

If there is something that the documentary does in a very competent way. It is to show that the normal public and even the professionals working in the industry don’t really know what is happening in the world of finance. There are so many factors to take into consideration that it seems like every single decision is made more with faith than facts in mind. It is truly horrifying. The series also explores how even the people that are against the system end up becoming part of it. As the series keeps explaining the events, who is right and who is wrong becomes a very blurry line.

Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga is not the best documentary on the subject, and it is far from being the best documentary on Netflix. The exploration of the subject and the events feels too shallow at times, and the aim to make a docuseries that is both informative and fun while being a cool experiment, doesn’t feel completely right. There are still a ton of elements that need more polish in order to achieve both goals at the same time. Watch this only if you’re truly interested in the subject, and you don’t know anything about it.

SCORE: 6/10