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As I was flipping through the selection of movies to watch during the flight, a title featuring the name Bezos sparked my interest. It had to be a biopic on Jeff Bezos and the founding of Amazon. I was hoping for something in a similar vein to the recently released BlackBerry and older films I enjoyed, such as The Social Network, Pirates of Silicon Valley, and even the rather obscure Micro Men 1.
What I received was instead a tacky Hallmark TV movie that attempted to appear ‘inspirational’ but instead showed overly enthusiastic performances that were very shallow. It is a shame to say this, but the film written by a script that barely made any effort to reach the bars set by these films I greatly enjoyed performed abysmally.
He talks in indistinct, though supportive, language about an unwed, teenage mother, an adopted father who fled a communist Cuba and grandparents who raised him, over footage of later life, bald Bezos strolling through an Amazon office. Part of this line does feel a bit defensive, suggesting that Bezos is preemptively countering the accusation often thrown at him that, in receiving funding from his parents (a pivotal point in the film), he in fact negates his success story. The myth-busting click-bait listicles that seek to deconstruct the illusion of a billionaire who made himself without the help of others always seem to focus on this as if anyone could transform an initial investment of $300k into a company with a valuation of roughly 1.9 trillion dollars in under 30 years. As the saying goes, and as the film itself states in its white-text-on-black epilogue, Mike and Jackie’s investment had the greatest return in human history.
My true family wealth was emotional, is developed further with syrupy flashback scenes like that of Jeff listening to grandfather’s homemade wisdom before the actor portraying Jeff Bezos pops out of his thousand yard stare to later shoe horn into the film a cherished phrase of the man, including regret minimalization or customer obsession, which somehow dilutes the perception. Most importantly, the film fails in relating these anecdotes to the actual business dealings of Bezos.
The film depicts the timeline within which an idea was made by Jeff Bezos to start an internet commerce company and until Amazon’s first paid order was placed. One of the early scenes shows Jeff Bezos reading an online article that details the exceptional growth of internet-based business. The camera then focuses on an italicized sentence and then, towards the end, Jeff highlights the sentence while re-reading the article.
Per Wikipedia, the reading of an online article marks an inciting incident so the film gets a point for accuracy, however, there must be better ways to capture that on camera. For all the other films in this genre which have been critiqued by the subjects themselves for the fiction added to the narrative, at least those were not boring.
With his wife and through some expository montage, Bezos had the idea of pitching an online book store to his hedge fund higher-ups. For the most part, they had no idea what they were doing, and to no surprise, the boss, one of the few actors that seem to be trying, shut him down completely. While this was discouraging to Bezos, his wife reinforced him. After all of this, and accompanied with some flashbacks, he decided to go on about the Regret Minimization Framework. From there, he terminated his employment and pursued entrepreneurship instead.
Jeff’s efforts to reach out to potential investors, the hiring of engineers, and the relocation to Seattle. The movie tries to inject some conflict or drama by showing some arguments between Jeff and Mackenzie or Amazon’s programmers complaining about their long hours and poor wages, but the performance hardly sells those moments. Bezos’s confrontations with the CEO of Barnes & Noble, Leonard Riggio, are also slightly more interesting. Kevin Sorbo, who plays Riggio, has the distinction of being the sole actor in the film who actually embodies his character. But there is no real advancement of this conflict because the scope of the film is so small. At the end, however, Barnes & Noble stays on top and Amazon has sold only one book.
During the film’s closing scene, Bezos and associates are doing a typical all-nighter during the website’s beta testing phase when a ding from their computer tells them they just made their first sale. Now, no one works as the screen blacks out for the customary series of white sentences on black backgrounds revealing Amazon’s valuation and Bezos’s wealth, and they are left with the feeling of “That’s all? Really? That’s where you are going to end it?”.
In the beta site version released for production, an Amazon employee gazes intently at the monitor. Their head developer appears to be pulling code from sawed off GitHub repositories for no reason.
As much as I do not want to continue watching the forgettable movie, the 99 minutes historians dedicate to this piece do not accurately capture the account of the largest online retailer (and cloud servicing provider) in existence. I guess that its subtitle The Beginning suggests the movie has more than one sequel, but one would not need any additional parts if this movie was made to be better.
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