Capital in the Twenty-First Century

If there's a depressing note to Piketty's circular view of history, it's his belief that egalitarianism often springs from catastrophic disaster ("everyone is equal in death" becomes a refrain), and that it's the slow grind of extreme wealth and extreme poverty that breeds those disasters.

Capital in the 21st Century, in documentary form, is an almost overwhelming alarm bell, a call to action and a fact, chart, animated illustration-and-quote-stuffed history of “how we got here” in the first place.

This is a movie that provokes a consistent sense of “Whoa!” By the end, you’ll know with greater clarity than you did before why we’re in the mess we’re in.

As directed by New Zealand filmmaker Justin Pemberton, “Capital” is a sleek tour of economic history over the last 400 years or so.

The film necessarily lacks the thoroughness and interrogative qualities of Piketty’s written approach. More than the cutaways to Gordon Gekko and the Simpsons, it tends to be the economist’s own observations that satisfy the true wonk itch.

Documentaries should be more than a vehicle for information. Here, the message is hard to argue with, but the medium – an excess of music video-style cutting, contemporary pop culture montages and literal music cues – does the material no favours.

Justin Pemberton’s documentary, based on the bestselling book by French economist Thomas Piketty, tells us a story no less depressing or gruesomely hypnotic for being so familiar – like observing a slo-mo driverless car crash from the passenger seat.

This entire documentary is based on the most silly and absurd economic analysis, if you want to call it that, ever heard. Facts don't really matter, unless Picketty invented them out of thin air. The ideas are absurdly radical and simply incorrect, but no matter... you can stick this right next to Hulu's doc on Hillary. Basically they should both be re-catagorized as horror movies.