Criteria for Evaluating a Documentary

1. The point of view should be objective
2. The documentary should have a coherent point of view
3. It sholud provide strong evidences to support his argument
4. It should not simplify the question
5. It should make a reasonable connection between cause and effect
6. It should provide some solution to deal with this situation

In the documentary "Bowling for Columbine", the director tried to use Columbine tragedy to argue against the gun abuse. The director first presented how easily people can buy guns and ammunition from the stores, then he compared the gun shooting statistical data from different countries to support his argument that gun abuse is the main cause causing these tragedies. He also mentioned some other influences like racism and violent TV shows, which might cause schoole violence. At first glance, this documentary seems to be an impressive one, but after a closer examination, it has some falwed points and wrong connections between cause and effect.
First, this documentary mentioned about school tragedies and gun shooting problems. He then attributed the main cause to the NRA organization and loose gun regulations. But by looking at most research and academic papers, we can find out there are numerous causes associated with school violence. Like physicological problem, violent family background, isolation from peers, etc... In this documentary, the director did not mention anything about these important issues. He just tried to simplify the problem and made people believe that "gun" is the only one cause to trigger these school violence events. There is also no coherent point of view in this documentary. It seemed to discuss school violence at the beginning, but it does so in a shallow manner and superficially. Then he talked about the gun shooting in US and other countries, and then make an argument that gun abuse is the main reason to cause these differences. But these connections between cause and effect are not reasonable and convincing. We should do more interviews and comprehensive investigations to figure out what caused these gun shooting events and school tragedies. Whithout doing these surveys, we cannot conclude a reasonable connection between the gun abuse and these tragedy events. In other words, we cannot just use the gun shooting statistical data in different countries to infer that loose gun regulation in US is the main cause leading to these differences.
At the last, this documentary didn't provide a good solution to deal with this problem. The director believed that these tragedies can be halted if selling guns is prohibited in US. But obviously, it is not the best solution to solve the problem. Because people can always find other tools to commit these crimes if we don't help them to release their anger and rage. We need to pay more attention to family and school environment to prevent these school violence events. Maybe a good counseling program can be a more effective way to help our child to deal with their anger and prevent the tragedy happening.
According to these points we discussed above, we can see that this documentary has no coherent point of view. And the director is too subjective, making a suspicious argument that the gun abuse is the original cause causing these crimes. There is also no convincing connection between cause and effect. The director oversimplify the problem and provide no effective sloution to this problem. In sum, We cannot persuade ourselves that this documentary is a good one.