The New Corporation (Jennifer Abbott, Joel Bakan) [Archive]

Stay Puft

01-12-2021, 08:35 AM

I could go either way, but voted nay: it's a succinct overview of recent corporate branding strategies but it's also scattershot in the way it attempts to tackle a variety of threads and bring them together, never really succeeding, or at least not in a way that's actually interesting or informative. I remember watching the original film, The Corporation, and being taken in by its sprawling scope, and the thought experiment that drives the whole enterprise (if corporations are people, what kind of people are they?). But I was literally a teenager then, and the world has changed quite a bit, and I've changed quite a bit, and maybe it's a little unfair to the film, but it felt like I was watching a documentary scrambling to keep up and stay relevant (not least of all because it actually spends time reminding you of the importance of the first film). The way its produced is shallow, slick and annoying at times (some of the music cues are risible), and also sometimes felt like a run-of-the-mill VICE News video, which made it all the more amusing when it started using VICE News clips in its montages. It has an optimistic conclusion and encourages people to get involved in local politics, but I feel like it's also missing half of the story here but never really interrogating the philosophy behind these "corrupted" systems or effectively demonstrating their interconnectedness (the film pays lip service to intersectional theories but again it's a superficial film at best).

I'm sure this joke has already been beaten to death, but the takeaway is that this sequel really wasn't necessary.