RSSSupersize Me
May 26th, 2006 | View Comments
Director: Morgan Spurlock
Rating: 
Buy Supersize Me on Amazon.com
As I mentioned in my review of Fast Food Nation, I was having a McDonald’s craving the whole time I was watching this movie. The movie promotes the idea that McDonald’s is addictive, and I guess my craving would be evidence for that.
For those who don’t know the premise, Morgan Spurlock eats nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days straight, just to see what will happen to him. What happens is that his health goes south very quickly and reaches a point that doctors suggest is quite dangerous.
Morgan unabashedly hits McDonald’s from all sides with art, humor, statistics, interns, his vegan girlfriend, and a small army of doctors and other experts. The DVD special feature involving the magically non-rotting fries is highly amusing, if obviously aimed at getting you to associate McDonald’s food with mold, slime, and other forms of inedible disgustingness.
The weak point of the movie is, unfortunately, the premise. While the other information that gets presented seems to be fairly solid, Morgan’s 30-day experiment is hopelessly flawed. Aside from the obvious problem that no sane person eats nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days straight, and furthermore eats it until they throw up, Morgan was, before beginning his fast food-fest, an extremely healthy person leading an extremely healthy lifestyle. And in order to make his results relevant to the average person (despite doing a very non-average thing), he changed his lifestyle to make it more like that of the average American - he stopped exercising, he stopped walking to work, etc. We have no idea how much those lifestyle changes contributed to the downturn in his health. Furthermore, we have no idea how much the downturn could have been slowed or stopped, had he taken even some of the advice from his nutritionist: popping a daily multivitamin and switching to diet soda. It’s also possible that given Morgan’s extremely healthy lifestyle at the start, that his body was much more shocked by the change than the average American body would have been.
As much as this movie is clearly an attack on McDonald’s and the fast food industry, there are moments where it seems to be paying a twisted sort of homage to McDonald’s culture. There is the (tall, skinny) guy who eats multiple Big Macs a day, the group of women who can’t remember the Pledge of Allegiance but know the McDonald’s jingle, and the couple who has thousands of pieces of McDonald’s memorabilia.
Supersize Me is very entertaining, but take what you see with a grain of salt.
Yvonne posted this on May 26th, 2006 @ 3:02am in Movie Reviews | Permalink to "Supersize Me"
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