Frankensteer (2005)
*** (out of 4)
Well meaning, if one sided, documentary taking a look at the various issues involved in producing meat today, which is then of course fed to people, which could lead to their deaths. The documentary has one main focus and that is to inform people that eating meat is very, very bad and could end up killing you. The film covers the early days of meat production when cows were simply fed grass to get bigger and they were growing in a natural environment. We then get to current practices that involve the cows growing up side by side with hundreds of others, which could cause diseases to spread. Another big problem is the fact that steroids and other chemicals are given to cows to make them fatter. Overall this is a fairly entertaining documentary but it runs just 44-minutes so there's a lot of interesting things that were left out. The biggest problem I had with this film is the fact, like so many other documentaries being made today, is that it talks about all this "bad" stuff yet we never get to hear from anyone on the other side to present their story so that we can make up our own mind. Instead of giving us both sides of the story and letting us make up our mind, the documentary just feeds us its message but, again, like so many others, it gives us these messages and yet it never comes up with a reasonable answer for the problem they're presenting. They talk about just feeding cows all grass but then they don't ever come up with solving the problem of countries simply running out of meat for their people. It doesn't bring up how higher prices meat like this could be made affordable for poorer families. Again, this is a good documentary that should keep you entertained if you're interested in the subject but there's no question that it needed to go a lot further to make it great.