The film’s biggest weakness is the way Gibney feints at a larger purpose without really carrying it out.įor viewers not already intimately informed on the Theranos scandal, The Inventor’s first act may seem like a frustrating pile-on of trivia without enough substance to tell the story it teases. But The Inventor doesn’t dig particularly far into that idea, or spend much time contextualizing Theranos in terms of other Silicon Valley startups that have soared or folded. It’s an inherently unstable model that sometimes works, and the rewards if it does can be tremendous. And it implies that the entire structure of the VC world encourages a “fake it ’til you make it” attitude toward technology, with people like Holmes pretending they’ve developed groundbreaking devices, then using the resulting investments to try to bootstrap the technology they claim they’ve already created. It hints that the Silicon Valley startup industry openly encourages companies to lie to investors, and that the lack of regulatory oversight makes it easy for charismatic liars to get away with outsized promises. There are hints, especially toward the end of The Inventor, that it’s going to explore a wider problem and find larger messages in the Theranos mess.
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