If that's what you got from the movie, then you bought the political propaganda and Krugmanism it is selling (i.e., "Wall Street and big banks are responsible for the Great Recession and people should have gone to jail and big financial institutions need to be broken up and we need a lot more regulation of "Wall Street" and the banks") behind a pretty good story by Michael Lewis about few (not even the largest, by far) short sellers who figured out how to use leveraged CDS (Credit Default Swaps) — issued mostly by AIG's London-based financial derivatives office, to insure against mortgage "paper risk" — to short the MBS/ CDO market. One of the big problems was that because there was no central clearance, CDSs were seriously oversubscribed, which exacerbated but by no means caused the Great Recession.
Read more in Did 'The Big Short' Get It Right? - Newsweek, by Jeffrey A. Tucker, 2016 January 2
There are several movies about the period, most are crappy left-wing pseudo-documentaries (like Charles Ferguson's Inside Job (2010) or Michael Moore's Capitalism: The Love Story (2009) etc. etc.) that make up the "facts" about "Wall Street" or "The Fed" but completely leave out or mention only in passing the role of the government regulations and mandates (like CRA, FHA and HUD, among others) and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac which have been responsible for relaxing the lending standards and forcing banks to make certain percentage of subprime loans — which they had to package into MBSs and CDOs and sell, often to the agencies, to reduce their own risk (which was neither illegal nor imprudent)...
From the rest, though, I would only recommend Margin Call (2011) and Too Big To Fail (2011), in that order...
I agree with you, however we were flooded with stories of people working in McDonald’s getting 500K mortgages. When the collapse happened, the story out of Washington was it was our fault. They blamed poor loan decisions and the fact that the poor banks were forced to lend to minorities. Well, we had no other choice but to bail them out. “It wasn’t the banks fault.”
I think the movie does a good job of pulling the curtain back.