Gamestop: Rise of the Players

The GameStop stonk saga was a fascinating news story to follow in real time. The internet rising up, investing in a failing business to screw rich hedge funds and fight back against the 1% and make some money for themselves in the process. It would make for a great documentary. This is not that documentary, because the story behind the story really isn’t what you want to hear. On format alone, this doc is tedious. It spends over a half an hour introducing the nine people who are called the GameStop Gang, or the GMEDD, who were the major players in making the stock balloon. It’s another half hour before the good part of the saga — the stock going crazy — happens. So it’s an HOUR of build. That’s a lousy way to tell a story. Worse still, if you followed the story, all this does is put names to faces. It offers no clever insight, no deeper understanding, nothing of substance. It is a cliffnotes version of events. But what makes this doc worse is how this movie comes off about many of its subjects. Hedge funds are disgusting, and the idea of short selling — betting on a failing company to continue failing — is repulsive. But this movie paints GameStop as the beleaguered little guy, being beaten up by Wall Street vultures. IT’S A MULTIBILLION DOLLAR GLOBAL COMPANY! The doc states at one pint they had 6000 — SIX THOUSAND — stores in the United States ALONE. If this were some struggling business that had always been owned by the founding family, something like the situation in the movie Other People’s Money, then you have something. But GameStop isn’t an underdog. If they die, and gamers want physical media, we’ll just go to Target. And then there’s the GMEDD, the noble crusaders whom this movie can’t stop adulating. This movie cannot stop masturbating to its own reflection, and it is nauseating, because these people are just as terrible as the hedge funds. The doc keeps calling them “retail traders”, which is code for “not an investment group”, but glosses over the fact that many of the original nine are PROFESSIONAL TRADERS. They may not work for banks or hedge funds, but trading is what many of them do for a living. So why in the hell should I find ANYTHING they’re doing noble, when they hVe the same goals and intentions as the monoliths they’re supposedly battling? NONE of them did it to be warriors for the 99%; they all saw a unique set of circumstances that presented a great investment opportunity, and it spawned a cult-slash-fad. Period. They can pat themselves on the back, and this movie can fellate them in every frame, but the fact of the matter is they’re capitalists just like the hedge funds. One of them even cries in a YouTube video clip about his portfolio being decimated after Robinhood froze trading. These are the heroes this doc is trying to push? These greedy, soulless, money-grubbing pigs? When your strategy against the monsters is to use the process to become one instead of taking down the system, you’ve failed. And worst of all, this doc has the audacity at the end to present it like their actions were some kind of kill shot, that they broke Wall Street’s back. “Hedge funds have lost $13 billion and counting”, the closing graphic says. What it doesn’t mention is the hedge funds are still around, and still making billions doing the same things. Not one stock has had the meteoric rise GameStop has, and Wall Street will make sure if it starts to happen again, they’ll arrest it. The revolution affected nothing. It’s like it never happened. Don’t watch this. Don’t waste your time. It is the grossest example of someone trying to validate themselves by doing the same terrible thing as someone else, but by being someone else excuses it.