Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room

12/30/2021

I'm surprised by the how often this movie is recommended on forums I frequent online, and the corresponding glowing Rotten Tomatoes reviews. I found the storytelling to be inconsistently paced, and there was nearly no depth to the description of actually how the fraud was perpetrated. The tie-in to California was interesting and I appreciated all of the primary content they were able to use -- company videos, recordings, etc. Still, I don't think I'd recommend this to a modern viewer.

1/14/2023

From the start the documentary makes it clear that it's a hit-piece. It has a clear agenda it's pushing and the film makers don't hold back on telling the public that, yes, Enron was evil. However, honestly, despite that it was pretty fair. It actually made more of a point to detail how Enron got to the place that brought convictions rather than doing a straight hit-piece on the corporation. In other words, there is really a lot of meat on the bone here and it does a decent job of detailing the evolution of the company and why it turned out the way it did, rather than just focusing on the political mess that it created as one would have expected on a film covering this topic, and one with a fairly snarky title at that. There is a lot to learn from watching this, particularly becau