The announcement of Video Games: The Movie was exciting and promising enough to help most fans stomach its amateur status (and its awkward title). Not that gaming documentaries are a rarity anymore; other recent, popular flicks have poked their noses into gaming culture, but they’ve typically chosen and focused on a niche, like competitive retro play or small-fry development.

VGTM, on the other hand, cast its documentary net wide by way of a giant interview cast. With luminaries like Nolan Bushnell, Warren Spector, Rob Pardo, David Crane (Pitfall), and other important games-history figures, the film’s comprehensive reputation preceded it.

Unfortunately, the film's scope, in fact, is its greatest stumble. This feature-length debut from director Jeremy Snead boasts an impressive cast and noticeable polish, but it has “overreach” written all over it, proven by a lack of focus, wildly varying levels of authority, and crippling indecision about whether gaming culture should still adopt the defensive pose of old.

Sub-genres, you say?

The film, currently available for purchase on video-on-demand shops like iTunes, opens with a montage of video games over the years (some of which are apparently captured with buggy emulators, particularly N64 clips) before the film’s “stars” come into view: actor Wil Wheaton, Gearbox Software Director Randy Pitchford, and screenwriter Max Landis. They each take turns advocating for how omnipresent video games have become in modern society, and they continue to do so for much of the film’s two-hour run time. How authoritative is this film going to be if its major talking heads aren’t the industry’s elder statesmen?

Almost immediately, VGTM trots out a series of sales and demographic statistics, read aloud by narrator Sean Astin (Lord of the Rings, Rudy). This scene immediately sets a bad tone—that this film is for an audience so dumb that it needs reassurances about how games sell and how well ESRB ratings are enforced (let alone the shocking revelation that games, like other media, can be divided into “genres” and “sub-genres”).

Following that, the film presents a fast-forward take on gaming’s history, answering the question of “what was the first video game?” with a brief explanation of games like Space War and Tennis For Two before very nearly shrugging its shoulders and moving on to a timeline populated by arcade machines and home consoles. This section, conversely, is a lightning round of nerdy shorthand and personal anecdotes, and while its talking heads include a few incredible names like Al Alcorn, the original engineer of Pong, many of the speakers are noticeably detached from the subject matter.

At one point, Nintendo President Reggie Fils-Aime pops in to describe the Super Nintendo, a product that preceded his hiring by over a decade; at another, Nerdist host Chris Hardwick and actor Donald Faison talk about their childhood experiences with rapidly improving consoles. For the most part, the people who occupy VGTM are neither amusing “I Love The ’80s”-style anchors nor informative historians—and more importantly, the latter don’t receive much screen time.

The game’s few history sequences are always interrupted too soon, sometimes to argue for the artfulness of games, and other times to put on a defensive pose and tell us how cool gaming has become. “Being called a gamer would soon be in vogue,” Astin says, but the footage that follows—of stone-faced e-sports competitions, awkward late-night TV sequences, and Cliff Bleszinski holding a Gears of War chainsaw-gun—doesn’t make the case for gaming looking hip.

Worse, the film hops around too often when recounting gaming’s history, as if it fears that telling us too much too soon will turn us off. It has to rewind to dig into the nitty-gritty of Atari’s great crash, and it backs up again when recalling arguments about whether video games are too violent. That latter sequence comes off as particularly shallow because it lacks an unbiased look at the variety and validity of studies about video game violence.

Sorry, PC master race

The rest of the film is a brief “how the sausage is made” sequence that centers almost exclusively on Sony’s The Last of Us, along with a brief glimpse at “future” tech like Oculus Rift and a montage of next-gen console games (not to mention an embarrassing, overlong shot of new consoles on white, glossy surfaces, as if the film were an ad for new game systems all along). And then… another series of talking heads insisting that gaming will be with us for a long time, and roll credits.

If this review seems to cut too quickly through the details of gaming’s history, then you’re reading it correctly. So many stories, details, and perspectives are almost entirely absent or only represented by brief screenshots. PC gaming doesn’t exist in VGTM, with the exception of a call-out to Doom—even though the CD-ROM era, floated by the mega-success of Myst, would have been an ideal point of history for this documentary’s obsession with showing gaming as a mainstream pastime.

We’ll forgive VGTM for skipping consoles like the 3DO and the Jaguar, but stories like Sega’s collapse, Nintendo’s fall from grace, the end of the arcade (or the beginning of the barcade), the rise of MMOs, the App Store’s impact, the basement-design world of indie gaming, the explosion of free-to-play outside of the West—these are low-hanging fruit. Had the movie packed its chosen stories with insightful commentary, its selection issues might be forgiven, but its voices too frequently emote about how cool gaming is—telling, not showing.

Indie Game: The Movie took knocks for being too focused, putting only a few game makers on a giant pedestal, but at least that setup resulted in tight storytelling and a sense of perspective. Recent amateurish documentary Gaming In Color suffered with similar issues of cheerleading (not to mention bias, since its producers were also responsible for the GaymerX expo and used the doc as a commercial of sorts), but at least that film found a subset of gaming worth devoting two hours to.

VGTM enjoys a few flashes of brilliance, like when PS4 architect and longtime designer Mark Cerny talks about the difference between filmmaking and game making: “If you want emotion, in film, a human face is the cheapest thing. Point a camera and you have it instantly. In games, you need a multi-million investment in tech before you see anything that looks like a human face.”

Perhaps the filmmakers had to leave a ton of similar quotes and overlong stories on the cutting room floor to keep up the pace and conclude at the 1:40 mark. If so, it just puts the film’s ambition under further scrutiny. The only good news, really, is that this film is proof that a Ken Burns-level documentary series about gaming might actually work. So many stories of development, fandom, and progress stretch across so many countries—and now, multiple generations—that we may one day see, and actually enjoy, something called Video Games: The TV Series.