Synopsis
This movie starts in the thick of it with the company starting to lay off people on an entire floor. The first fire we see is of a man named Eric Dale. Eric is surprised that he was even going to be fired because of his role in the company but it seems that they are coming for everyone in this firing spree. As Eric is leaving he mentions that he’s been working on something. First, he tells Will who comforts him by saying that he no longer has to deal with the company’s business, he’s free now. The second person he tells is Peter. He gives Peter the hard drive that his work is on and before he goes he says “be careful.” Doing all of this naturally caused Peter to be curious as to what Eric had been working on. So that night Peter went through the work and was able to complete it. After doing so he found that the company had been replicating the same graphs of companies within a bubble. I believe it was 5 days out of the last two weeks that they replicated the graph. Eric’s work didn’t stop there, it also predicted that the company would not be profiting for very long. When Peter found this out he immediately got his friend Seth to bring Will in to see Eric’s work. With Will now seeing it two things had to be done: the high-ups need to be notified immediately and they need to find Eric Dale. This is what sets the movie into motion.
Interpretation
The movie did a great job of illustrating the 2008 recession from the perspective of a large organization finding out before the rest of the world did. After 2008, the world looked at the large corporation as those who were responsible and to blame for the incident while in the movie they want them to know that they’re not alone. A recurring idea in the movie was that those in charge had almost no understanding of the company’s specifics. They made it abundantly clear that they were in the dark mainly because it wasn’t their job to learn the specifics. The movie also showed that the company was willing to let other people lose their money knowing that they were selling something that had no value. They tried to justify it by saying if the person wants to buy then let them buy. This was clearly wrong and it highlights the moral environment. Nothing is more important than money, they don’t care if other people are losing it if they continue to gain it.
My favourite moment in the movie was Eric talking about the bridge that he made. This was Eric trying to explain to Will that there are more important things than money, which is helping people. Eric created a bridge, with his calculation he was saving people thousands of hours in the car because of where the bridge was and how it was set up. Eric took pride in that what he did allowed people to get back the most valuable thing in the world, time. This point put Dale in a new light. He was different than the people that he would work with by having different priorities. Will was trying to get him to come back to the office where he would just get paid to be there but with this story, he showed that some things are worth more than money. This great moment was ruined when we later saw Eric come back to the office even after how he was treated when fired. But just like he claimed, “he needed the money.” Showing that at the end of the day, it always comes back to money. Like many of the other people in this movie, Eric set aside their principles in the pursuit of money, and the 2008 bubble didn’t help them learn their lesson.
