Quality filmmaking has been slow coming to Netflix. They seem pretty content most of the time to make something cute and watchable, not caring how memorable their content is. The big exception is the documentary genre, where they have been churning out pretty solid content for years now, winning people by focusing on a zeitgeisty subject. 2019 has been another great year for their documentary producers, staring with Fyre, and adding The Great Hack, about a little eensy teensy scandal called the Cambridge Analytica Scandal.
Cambridge Analytica was a company that Facebook had employed to help mine their user data. What pissed everyone off about CA was they used this data to help target propaganda toward specific users to influence the 2016 US election and the UK’s Brexit vote. The documentary goes through the company’s methodology and execution of their propaganda, as well as the whistleblowers who have helped expose their now criminal behavior, specifically their testimonies at political tribunals. Facebook and other tech companies are also caught in the crosshairs of The Great Hack for their behavior in employing companies like Cambridge Analytica.
The Great Hack plays more like a political thriller than a documentary, a testament to the movie’s storytelling. After scaring everyone to attention with their prologue. The movie’s main personal storylines are threefold. Journalist Carole Cadwalladr is trying to expose Cambridge Analytica’s abuse of user data for political gain. To do so, she helps persuade Brittany Kaiser, a former executive from Cambridge Analytica, to testify and hopefully whistleblow on the lies told by CA’s CEO Alexander Nix. And finally, David Carroll is going one level higher, trying to retrieve what data Facebook and Cambridge extracted from him. Carroll & Carole (good law firm name, right?) are the crusaders here, so we’re pretty easily invested in their cause; that’s not good thriller material though. It is Kaiser’s story where the documentarians (Jehane Noujaim and Karim Amer) struck gold. Much like the corporations and politicians that employed her, Kaiser is enigmatic with her motivations. She’s worked on both sides of the political aisle, sort of switching sides at random points or so it would seem. Plus, she’s the star witness: being a Cambridge executive, she got most of her data on her computer, including timelines of all her meetings, contradicting CA’s testimony about their timeline of events. She proves a fascinating and compelling documentary subject, with some of The Great Hack’s best material around Kaiser’s potential allegiance questions and how Cambridge Analytica combats her testimony through leaked damaging information.
Circling the tripod of personal storytelling is one of the great questions of our current time. What the hell is happening with all this data we are putting in public, and how is it being used? The documentary helps us connect the dots from us to Cambridge Analytica to Facebook. There are a couple new terms I will probably start using after watching this documentary: “data rights” and “weaponizing data.” Cambridge Analytica is the weapons manufacturer in this case: a big corporate entity using data in order to change opinions with laser precision (how they identify swing voters and market to them is particularly chilling). The scaries thing is: Cambridge Analytica is probably only the beginning, and the small corporate fish. Correctly, the documentary points out how Facebook, Google and other big tech companies are valued so highly because of the sheer amount of data they have on people. The company keeps insisting it’s here to connect people; however, when David Carroll tries to extract how his data is being sold from these tech companies – ya know, data rights – he’s meant with secrecy and obstruction, not exactly forthright like Mark Zuckerberg insists he is being. The documentary doesn’t explore how people are to blame for being manipulated and buying into shady tech giants; that’s probably because The Great Hack should probably be a miniseries, with all the questions its raising that it cannot possibly answer.
The Great Hack checks off all the important documentary boxes. It gets your attention about a subject you didn’t know or understand. It draws you in with a good human interest story. And it drives home its point with chilling data or stories and putting context to its subject. So everyone, the next time an App asks you for some stuff, maybe spend that 2-5 minutes figuring out exactly what they’re asking for so you don’t get “Crooked Hillary” or “Black Lives Matter” propoganda bombarded in your general direction.