Bezos

This is my first review ever on here. I just had to. I don't get why this was such a low budget movie. One of the biggest companies on the planet. And a movie about one of the richest men in the world. Yet the direction, the camera used, the cinematography, even the actors, everything is C class. At least casting could have made up for it but it was such a bad selection of cast. The only great acting was by Alex Mitchell. The rest of the actors seriously looked like they were selected out of school play and were reciting lines. I mean what in the world happened? This did no justice to Jeff Bezos's Legacy. I feel bad for all those that worked on it, sorry you were low balled for the production budget of this movie. Either that or the budget was very poorly used and some poor production decisions were made sorry to say. I hope there can be legitimate remake that actually does justice like the Steve Jobs movies.

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.

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.

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.

This movie reminds me of Silicon Valley season, It has a lot of challenges and struggles to get your first order. I feel some jumps in timeline, they could have shown how Bezos validate his idea that selling books was the business model he wants to adapt though he could start selling something else. How he came up with this idea and selling books was not even exciting at that time I suppose. I really want this movie to be dead honest and serious, I hope next part will cover more in depth of challenges he has to face, because this movie is just the beginning and I would recommend this movie to watch.