Four Horsemen

There's so much in 4 HORSEMEN. Yes it is talk-heavy, very densely- presented in places but it makes brilliant connections.

It's like the big-idea documentaries by Adam Curtis. It's provocative and deliberately big picture. Some of the above crits feel petty in this regard, the point is to stay global.

It's also gripping & urgent. It squares up to the biggest crisis we're facing and has much to say that is fresh.

Surprisingly, it was also been made in the UK on a shoestring. Not that you could tell.

HIGHLY, HIGHLY RECOMMENDED!

There are all sorts of rumours flying about as to the authorship of this film.

Read the article: 'A Tale Of Plagiarism – I Wrote One Of The Year's Most Acclaimed Documentaries, Not That You'd Know It' on the Bleeding Cool website.

No matter, as to someone who doesn't understand finance but is interested, this is a great documentary.

Robert Zak, of Best For Film describes Four Horsemen as 'one of the clearest and most demystifying attempts at guiding us through the alien landscape of economics.'

Watch an extract of the film by going to YouTube and searching Fiat Money.

The Corporation-- seen it, End of Poverty --Seen it. Inside Job--seen it This social conscious genre is starting to all having in the same exact people saying the same exact things done the same exact tired way. Even the cover art is like the Corporation. How many more films on Sub-prime immorality?

The Voice over and the script for the narration is solid but let down by the format. And the same face contribute very little to the story to make this unique. The best themes seem under explored. The old ones over explored (again).

Someone said it was shot on a budget, but you do not need much money to shoot talking heads on a black background. How many times will this try cookie cutter filmmaking format visit us?

I do wish I'd watched this five or six years-ago - but maybe I wouldn't have appreciated it then. It's a little bit like 'Zeitgeist' except that it's all real, with genuine experts who - bar one, are cart carrying capitalists, so it isn't some socialist treatise on the iniquities of modern capitalism - it's a capitalist treatise on the iniquities of modern capitalism. It explains our parlous predicament very clearly, and suggests how we might be able to survive it and prepare ourselves for the future that we all sense is coming.

"Four Horsemen" is the debut feature from writer and director Ross Ashcroft and the four parts of this documentary address the banking crisis, the terrorism threat, worldwide poverty and ecological collapse respectively. While worthy, well-intentioned and (mostly) well-evidenced, for the non-political, this critique of rampant capitalism is probably heavy going with lots of talking heads - no less than 23 experts, including many senior economists and academics, express their trenchant views.

The film seems to have been popular in film festivals and indeed I saw it at the first London Labour Film Festival where it was applauded at the end, but it has some major deficiencies.

First, it is overly ambitious in scope and should perhaps have concentrated simply on the crisis of the banking sector. The links between the four threats were not always made clear and the section on terrorism was particularly weak and over simplistic. Second, the policies promulgated at the end - while rooted in a pro-capitalist position intended to be 'realistic' - involve some outrageously fanciful notions such as returning to a gold standard and abolishing income tax. I would like to know more about Ross Ashcroft and the funding of this work which might explain the source of these odd notions. Third, at no point in either the analysis or the prescription does the film acknowledge that economic and societal change does not start with institutional reform but with the organisation of workers, consumers and citizens. Real change comes through people working together in political parties, trade unions, pressure groups, and social movements.

For all these weaknesses, "Four Horsemen" does make you think and will engender much-needed debate about the urgent need to reform radically our ideas on how we create, consume and distribute wealth and how we regulate and control the institutions involved.