It’s scary that the events in this movie only happened a few years ago yet somehow it feels like a period piece not events from a very recent history. The movie takes place in the years preceding the 2008 real estate economic crisis when a small group of investors who saw the pending collapse coming and bet on it. Through these characters we learn a lot about what went wrong and how it went wrong. Adam Mckay keeps the pace clicking along and infuses a lot of levity and different story-telling techniques to transform what could be a very dull topic into something coherent and fun. The actors do a very good job overall, especially Steve Carell whose character I actually cared about and liked watching him evolve and change. The remaining characters are mostly one-dimensional, fun, but not much beyond what we see on the screen. The Big Short is a very good movie, it does what it intends to do with wit and style and keeps us engaged while we learn about synthetic CDOs.