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The Corporation rating 
4/5 The Corporation

   
Director Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott
Writer Joel Bakan, Harold Crooks, Mark Achbar
Certificate PG
Running time 144 minutes
Country Canada
Year 2003
Associated shops

Read Rebort's review of The Corporation

Reviewed by Boomslang

This is a documentary from the Michael Moore school of filmmaking - razor-sharp, wry black humour, lashing the backsides of big business and tyrannical governments - and, sure enough, he pops up fairly regularly to throw in his two cents.

Jennifer Abbott and Mark Archer's film is a relentless attack on the corporate giants and their immoral, often illegal practices. It is pacy, despite being exhaustingly long, yet wisely saves some of the best material till last, exposing corporate involvement and complicity in ruthless despotic governments.

Half way through, I was ready to start the revolution right there, but an hour later my zeal began to wain, feeling a little overwhelmed by the merciless onslaught. At two-and-a-half hours, it is very long, but then there is an awful lot to say.

Music is used well, with the rhythms creating the sense of some doomsday clock relentlessly counting down. Amongst the corporate ghouls on show, it presents the Wall Street trader as a monstrous offspring of decades of capitalist greed, with one describing how the trading community was baying for the war in Iraq to start, because of the money that would be made through rocketing oil prices.

It is full of factual nuggets that are great for dinner parties, many genuinely shocking, like Fanta being invented for the German Nazi market, so that Coca Cola could continue to profit from that regime, without tarnishing its image, or the early IBM computers being used by the Nazis to keep track of all the people they were killing and the urban myth that the Happy Birthday song is copyrighted - well, it's true, AOL Time Warner pockets $10,000 every time it's played commercially.

The film closes with a ray of hope for our seemingly doomed planet, with examples of "the people" triumphing over big business, and a plea for us all to take a stand. I was genuinlly shoked and stirred. As a result, I will no longer be buying my shopping from Asda WallMart.

Viva la revolution!

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Read Rebort's review of The Corporation