The Corporation came at exactly the right time to both capture and further the zeitgeist. Trust in big companies, governments and institutions was at an all time low thanks to pop culture artifacts like The X Files, we were all talking about predatory or monopoly practices in markets and slave labour in the developing world, cultural touchstones like WTO and IMF protests in big cities ere big news, and the new generation of activist authors like Naomi Klein were driving the conversation. I can still remember the understated, soporific, almost whispering tone of narrator Mikela Jay.

Ideas like using the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders to test the corporation's status as a psychotic person and talking heads from movement figureheads Klein, Noam Chomsky and Michael Moore and that sustainable carpet company guy made it a vibrant part of the left wing discourse.

Two decades later, is another film saying much the same thing (though not in a bad way) still relevant, needed or welcome? Absolutely, as the evidence shows – regardless of whether it's been long since overshadowed. Because if you think big companies don't still (and forever) press their advantage and behave in ways that border on (or cross over into) corrupt in order to consolidate their positions, I've got a bridge to sell you.

To some extent most of what's in it is second nature if you're aware of the kinds of issues it covers. Like the work of Edward Snowden or Julian Assange, all it does is pin evidence on actual events and names we (should) all know innately.

The first part of the film covers the efforts of the corporate world to rebrand itself as socially aware, putting resources towards any number of urgent societal problems from climate change to wealth disparity, but the merest scrutiny reveals pretty quickly that it's all spin, a few cents thrown to one side for PR as long as it doesn't threaten traditional (in many cases, dangerous, polluting or corrupt) revenue streams.

Back in 2003 we didn't have the GFC and the current awareness of the climate crisis, so this movie has fertile new material to plumb, connecting very easy-to-discern dots to show how the profit motive was/is responsible for both – as well as many other crises like them.

Like the original film did, it will make you angry and it'll try to give you hope, but though I hate to say it, ultimately the fact that we still need to talk about this kind of thing 20 years later tends to doom the effort.

We as a species have let the institution of the for-profit entity grow too powerful in society, and generations of Battles in Seattle, Occupy Wall Streets and their ilk have done nothing to dislodge the harms they do by their actions.

I was also reminded of the financial performance of Michael Moore's Capitalism: A Love Story in 2009. After becoming a rock star documentary maker and making the form the hottest new genre in cinema during the 2000s, it seemed everyone got tired of him, the film flopping. In the same way, this movie arrived and disappeared on streaming without making any cultural impact – certainly not as much as the first film did.

Maybe the anti-corporate mood will come around again, but I suspect this film has arrived when it's at a low ebb and nobody cares much right now.