King Corn follows two filmmaker bro's into Iowa as they take on precisely one acre of land to witness the process of modern corn farming from start to finish. Filling the unexpected gaps between their work - which takes very little time using modern machinery and processes - are a number of interviews of different perspectives on the corn industry. You have the food experts who discuss the trouble with growing immense amounts of nutritionally dead corn to create products like glucose, you have other experts who describe the incredible efficiency and achievement of the industry, then you have the small town farmers who make their living doing something they are increasingly dispassionate about.
The idea of two city-dwellers bumbling into a small town to grow an acre of corn is a great way to build a narrative that the majority of viewers who don't know anything about agriculture can follow. Witnessing the process and hearing the interviews along the way helps to build a snapshot of an industry we are all participating in (via consumption) yet tend to know nothing about.
However, this narrative is also what drags the documentary down. The two filmmakers don't really do or say anything interesting, and their footage ends up creating a lot of dead space. They never express much of how they feel or react to the mostly negative information of the film, beyond trying their own corn and realizing it tastes horrible because it was designed to be a commodity rather than food.
There is something to be said for remaining ambivalent, as a filmmaker, to let the audience decide how they feel. Yet this 1.5 hour documentary obviously takes the position that there is a problem with the American corn industry. The government subsidizes the production of nutritionally dead corn that can't even be eaten, which ends up fueling an unhealthy diet of sickly meat and diabetes inducing sodas. But rather than fully executing this position and giving a direction for the viewer to go from there, whether it's how to do something or how to do more research on the topic, the filmmakers continue to film themselves bumbling about the small town doing not much of anything.
Not only does the poorly executed narrative aspect drag King Corn down as a film, it also negates its potential as a call to action. It's obvious by the end that there's a big problem in the food industry, yet the narrative reaction is basically "aww man this sucks". I think at the time the film came out, it may have seemed more appropriate to reveal shocking aspects of systems we take for granted - without much critical analyses on the way - but documentaries have come a long way in the past decade and now King Corn seems like a simplistic reaction to a complex problem.
Nonetheless, King Corn does offer a good snapshot of modern American corn and its problematic nature. Spending a year in a small town brings the viewer through something most of us city-dwellers wouldn't normally see. Overall it isn't a bad watch, but viewers should feel encouraged to dig deeper after the fact and think about how they are or aren't complacent in the issue - rather than taking the defeatist stance the filmmakers did.
