Every so often, a film comes along that makes the viewer actually stop and think. That film is The Big Short. 

The movie tries to explain how the banks sold mortgages to people with poor credit and certified them at higher safety ratings than they should, in the years leading up to the financial crisis of 2007. The film follows some of the major players in the disaster, such as Deutsche Bank trader Greg Lippmann and hedge fund manager Michael Burry, who saw the collapse coming. 

However, even after seeing it, I have no clue what a Collateralized Debt Obligation is or what happened to the mortgages that failed. The scenes were fast paced and sometimes hard to follow, the technical terms get confusing and there are a lot of characters of which to keep track.  

But I did learn one thing: Wall Street bankers do not care. They do not care about the lives they ruined or the people who lost their jobs, homes or retirement funds. They only care about money, as seen in the movie by the indifference of the bank owners. 

As I walked out of the theater, I found it impossible to comprehend what I had just witnessed. There were people like Burry, who in the film goes through files and realizes there is a bubble. He chooses to bet on this bubble bursting and begins shorting the housing market. Essentially, a short is borrowing shares of a company and selling them. By trading on this knowledge, bankers made money. Lots of money. Billions of dollars. 

How does someone, like Burry, learn that millions of people are going to lose their livelihood and choose to use that knowledge to make themselves, or their clients, rich and not inform the public that this is happening? How does one stop caring about the well being of others and starts seeing people as numbers instead of families with hopes and dreams? And how does one watch a disaster coming to a head, that will destroy not only your nation but tank the rest of the world as well and not have qualms about your actions? 

An idea then dawned on me. It’s not just Wall Street bankers and stock traders, it’s people in general: we all sell a part of ourselves everyday. In a day or two, I, like most viewers in that theater, will forget about the movie and the anger and frustration that came with watching. I will no longer think about the stock traders that got rich or the bank employees that lost their jobs because their bosses cheated the system. 

But there are people that cannot forget what happened in 2007. Eight million people lost their homes. Four trillion dollars, made up of people’s retirement accounts and life savings, were lost. They cannot forget what happened because their lives fell apart. 

But nothing has changed: no bankers went to jail, no restrictions were passed to prevent this from happening again in the future. In fact, the banks got bailouts, to the tune of $200 billion, which came from taxpayer dollars. Although many businesses and people went bankrupt, there were some major winners, granted they were people who were already wealthy, most being in the top one percent. So, Americans lost their money in the stock market, and then a portion of their earnings went to taxes, which went right into the accounts of those that threw away their life savings in the first place. Makes perfect sense. 

There comes a point in the movie when two traders, Jamie Mai and Charles Ledley, played by Finn Wittrock and John Magaro respectively, try to inform a reporter at the Wall Street Journal of what is happening, and they are laughed out of his office. While the reporter is curious, he is not willing to risk his reputation on the word of two small traders from Colorado. Although the film took some liberties with the stories of Mai and Ledley, the characters are based on real people who made out well from the crash. Their story shows that even when someone tried to do the right thing, they could not because of the impenetrable shield that is cast over Wall Street.  

Is this movie perfect? No, it misses portions of what actually happened. Most of the scenes are composites of multiple events, probably because all the events could not fit into two hours and ten minutes. Is it the best movie I have ever seen? No, I still would rank other movies above it. I do not think it will win at the Oscars, although the actors did well with their parts. 

Even so, I hope that other moviegoers will not only be moved by the story, but also yearn to work towards preventing an incident from occurring again. This means that Wall Street’s actions need to be regulated and when traders lose billions of people’s life savings they need to be prosecuted for their crimes. 

Despite all of its faults, The Big Short did give me insight into what happened in 2007 and made me care, even if for a short time. It made me wonder how many people a bank has to ruin before they are brought to justice. And most importantly, it made me wonder how long until this happens again. Bankers got away with it once. What’s to stop them from doing it again?