just watch it!

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

It’s sentimental, ridiculously long and only occasionally funny

This is getting seven out of ten from me because it cut a good line between being informative and entertaining. It tried to be human and occasionally witty, particularly with the whitewashing of Paulson, while blasting through events at rapid speed. It needed to, because a lot was attempted and a lot happened. While the human side wasn't always perfectly effective, the sequence of events and the reasoning behind the actions is fairly clear, enough so to remind me all about what happened and how much worse things could be. Not the greatest entertainment, but effective if you come in with an interest in the material.I wouldn't have bothered with the review at all were it not for the other reviews on here, which seem to be angry at a straightforward narrative decision to focus on Paulson and make him look like a decent human being, which is evidently unforgivable. This attitude is exactly why I've lost empathy for the average American over the last few years and gained it for people in positions of major responsibility. I'm tired of the wholesale apotheosis of the pathetic. Paulson made some genuinely good moves, and putting more decisions in the hands of the stupid multitude would have made everything worse. Hardly anyone complained about the vivisection of Glass-Steagal when it happened, which makes sense because hardly anyone really understands modern banking anyway. So I made my decision: I dropped the brain-dead populism, I stopped finding any excuse to help abdicate responsibility for the fools who bought too much house they couldn't afford, and I'm not joining any more choruses of those begging for bailouts for millions of ordinary people who couldn't keep their job or find a new one. Living helplessly doesn't garner my attention anymore. Most of the people involved in the story here went along with a broadly shared delusion of value in CDO/MBS's, then tried to pull off some damage control in a hugely complicated situation, meeting with some success while not always being smart about who to trust. The masses go along with delusions constantly, too, and they have no better record on choosing who to trust, Washington. I'm more inspired by power used competently, or even semi-competently, than inspired to throw up a middle finger because I don't feel like being a grown up anymore. Why do so many reviewers find juvenile finger-pointing worthwhile, anyway?

If you intend to watch this movie for entertainment purposes - probably you can pick something better than financial meltdown, however if you intend to watch this movie for the purpose of better insight on what really happened - you should skip it and look further.. poor attempt to create superman heroes out of paulson, bernanke and entire banking safeguard crowd. During the movie, i honestly didn't know if i should laugh or cry ..it is honestly sad and tragedy if they sell this material to anyone on this planet as a story of what truly happened. there is a good reason why banking industry calls equity stocks "stock markets retard brother" .. money market is where the money rolls and everyone in the chain is holding the ladder and full control is in place. I am not one of these conspiracy theories type, this has nothing to do with conspiracy - just corruption beyond possibility to comprehend..and turns - sadly out, that even HBO is holding the ladder... Paulson doesn't even has to bother one day to write himself a beautiful perky biography, script of this movies will do just fine ..as if he wrote it..

HBO and Peter Gould did a disservice to the American people by stuffing their nose up the ass of Wall Street and the Federal Reserve bank by not even coming close to laying blame where it belongs. The film is almost comical in its representation of Paulsen, Bernanke and Geithner. All three of these clowns are characterized as heroic as they struggle to save the American economy from collapsing. The film is mostly fiction and is clearly an attempt to hide the truth from the American people. I would recommend watching a more truthful depiction of what actually happened, as for example "Inside Job" which is actually a documentary and not a fictional representation. This is all in all, nothing but propaganda.

This story is subject to partisan prejudices as evidenced by another reviewer's assertion that the highly biased "Inside Job" is the "truth". To HBO's credit they resisted the temptation to use this sordid affair as a platform for opinion like Charles Ferguson did in "Inside Job". Instead they took a bare bones approach to the story. They give the viewer a summation of the events leading up to the government bailouts.This also hurts the story as character development is fairly shallow and the plot itself requires foreknowledge of the economic environment surrounding these events.Considering that these events occurred so recently any expectation that you will receive the complete story is unrealistic. Any person who thinks that the truth will be so quickly revealed is kidding themselves. There are facts that are still unknown that in time will be revealed. However, this movie does a good job of presenting the facts we do know in lay terms with resorting to the histrionics of propaganda films like "Inside Job".The actors do a solid job of portraying the individuals involved. There is no unnecessary depictions of personal foibles that do not in some way relate to the story. The acting is sober and fair,which is appropriate for this film's aim of presenting a factual narrative of the controversial events.Overall, I believe this movie to be a solid, objective, presentation of the financial mess of 2008. That some ideologues on IMDb object to that should not deter you. This movie is a good intro to what is a complex subject that requires far more then reading articles on the Internet to truly understand.