Before I get into any critiques (given below in the same order I thought of them), I just want to disclaim that my rating has nothing to do with the factual content of this film. When rating documentaries, I look at production quality and creative decisions made—how the information is presented, rather than the information itself. It wouldn't be fair to rate an awful documentary 10/10 because I agree with it, nor would it be fair to rate an impeccably produced documentary 1/10 because I disagree with the viewpoints presented.

That said, this documentary is very clearly against Wal-Mart. It's clear from the title alone. I don't agree that all of the misdeeds presented herein are actually Wal-Mart's responsibility, but I do agree with many of them. However, the only pro–Wal-Mart viewpoints shown were in footage of the CEO speaking at an annual meeting, and I would argue that Robert Greenwald could have balanced the opinions presented a bit (a lot) better.

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There's a whole section in this documentary on Wal-Mart's health insurance. The Affordable Care Act was signed into law four and a half years after this documentary came out, and that accelerated the upward spiral of health insurance costs. At first, when they started talking about healthcare, my first thought was, "Is this still accurate?" But if anything, the likelihood of Wal-Mart changing its approach to providing its workers with healthcare is unlikely to have changed. Meanwhile, health insurance costs have done nothing but rise since this documentary came out. I doubt Wal-Mart's company policies have gotten any cheaper (or even stayed the same price) amidst the rising tide of market rates.

One technical/creative decision that bothered me over the course of the film was the choice to "add variety" to the shots by using mirrored footage of interviewees. When some of the people talked for "too long" and there was no relevant footage to cut away to, the interviewee's image would be quite literally mirrored on the horizontal axis. That meant the background flipped, and any jewelry or accessories the person might be wearing would be suddenly on the other side of their face. It was honestly quite distracting.

The other recurring creative choice that got on my nerves was the "freeze frame and fade to black and white for text" effect used in nearly every segment. It really disrupted the flow, I thought, and the same facts and figures could have been presented over other shots. Freezing the video and forcing the viewer to focus _only_ on the text itself feels a little insulting, like the director doesn't think the viewer can pay attention to the text if _anything_ else is happening on screen or in the audio track. The one where the text was placed in a cardboard compactor with motion tracking and masking to follow the video (which didn't freeze-frame that time) was marginally better. That said, the facts presented in context, during the "Actual Wal-Mart Commercial" bits, were the exception to this complaint. Those worked extremely well (and realistically could not have been presented another way).

Honorable mention goes to the relatively short, but repeated, instances of obvious audio desync during certain interview segments. It doesn't happen most of the time, but during the interviews when it does it should have been easy to fix during editing.

In the segment on China, it really bugs me that the subjects' names are translated into English nicknames of sorts in the lower third. Their names should be transliterated, but not translated; the translations aren't really relevant. A name is a name, not a word, and shouldn't be treated as a word. The original Chinese audio is also much too quiet compared to the translator's voice, in my opinion.

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It has nothing to do with the film itself (and thus, no impact on my rating & review), but I question the decision to release this documentary in HD on Amazon Instant Video. It clearly wasn't filmed at particularly high quality, and the image quality is downright awful for most of it. The extra pixels do nothing for the film—and screenshots I've seen of the original DVD release actually look better.

Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price - a ninety-minute documentary demonising a massive company, and with no one from Wal-Mart prepared to go on record, there's no subjective balance. That said, they do look like horrible bastards, certainly in their native USA and in the Asian sweatshops where they manufacture their goods. The family themselves seem to have amassed 100 billion dollars between them, yet the employees can't afford the healthcare plan offered by the chain. A bunch of small towns are presented, showing how they've become virtual ghost towns as one business after another has folded. There are security cameras in their parking lots, but they're only used to monitor possible union activity or demonstrations. The rest of the time they're unmanned to save a wage and as a result Wal-Mart car-parks have become a haven for robberies, assaults, rapes, abductions and murders. Bangladeshi workers, making garments to be sold in store, work 14-hour days for 17 cents per hour and are literally beaten by the supervisors. An American inspector, a loyal employee of Wal-Mart in love with the company, was moved to tears by the conditions but upon reporting them to Wal-Mart, was promptly fired. Managers in stores stopped eating their lunches in the staff rooms because they would feel guilty sitting with employees who were so broke because of their terrible pay that they wouldn't have anything to eat on their hour breaks. Sweatshop workers in China were sent to live in the same dormitory, for which rent and utility bills were deducted from their pay. They were free to move out of the dormitory, but the rent would continue to be deducted anyway. The chinese workers are taught how to lie, and what lies to say to health inspectors who might visit the sweatshops. Gardening retail products containing pesticides and poisons are stored in car-parks, and when it rains those poisons run into the creek that provide a whole town with drinking water. There are examples all over the country of stores being fined for this practise. And so on, and so on. It's a damning piece of material on its own, but I think an attempt at hearing an alternate view might have made it even more powerful (in fairness, my understanding is not that Wal-Mart were not approached, but that they simply wouldn't co-operate). Anyway, 7/10, worth a look.