Four tech billionaires locomotion into a mansion. It sounds similar the setup for a punch line, but it besides forms astir the full conceit down “Mountainhead,” a savagely entertaining but somewhat shallow caller satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of “Succession.” The film, which is streaming connected HBO’s Max, is simply a benignant of enclosure play, its signifier a modernist castle successful Utah—the Mountainhead of the title—overlooking snowy peaks. The players are a quartet of friends, or, much accurately, frenemies, who lucifer a mishmash of real-world Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell plays Randall Garrett, the group’s Peter Thiel-esque mentor who, not dissimilar the precocious Steve Jobs, has crab that his doc tells him is incurable. (“Incorrect,” helium claims. He’s waiting to upload his encephalon to “the grid.”) Jason Schwartzman plays Hugo Van Yalk, the laminitis of a “life-style ace app.” He’s the proprietor of Mountainhead and the big of the gathering but is by acold the poorest of the crew, worthy a specified 5 100 and twenty-one million. Cory Michael Smith plays Venis (as successful “Venice,” not “penis”) Parish, an Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg stand-in who runs a societal level called Traam. Ramy Youssef is Jeff Abredazi, a somewhat much high-minded entrepreneur, who’s built an artificial-intelligence-driven moderation instrumentality called Bilter—social media’s “guardrails,” helium calls it. But, successful Armstrong’s universe, tech is ne'er morally successful the black, and the radical who make it are nary amended than despots—inept ones, astatine that. Even immoderate accelerationist ideals they clasp are yet secondary to the ngo of boosting their nett worths, the lone existent terrain connected which they attraction to compete.
“Mountainhead” skewers the fig of the heroic antheral entrepreneur, a Machiavellian archetype that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher whitethorn person inadvertently helped to conception with “The Social Network,” their 2010 movie fictionalizing Zuckerberg’s founding of Facebook. (“Like ‘Fountainhead’ Mountainhead?” Jeff asks, drafting the already evident Ayn Rand connection.) Armstrong has said that helium rushed to merchandise the movie retired of a tendency to seizure “the bubble of time” that we’re presently surviving in, and with the timeliness of his task helium has acceptable himself rather the challenge. It’s not casual to make fictional tech tycoons outré capable to captivate an assemblage erstwhile we’re inundated regular with quality of Musk, a distractable investor, inveterate gamer, and reported ketamine abuser (he denies this) who has fathered astatine slightest fourteen offspring with aggregate women. The property foibles connected show successful “Mountainhead”—spouting disconnected astir Hegel, fixating connected cooking a turbot, adjacent paranoiacally sending spies aft a girlfriend—pale adjacent to those successful our reality. The movie is stronger erstwhile it aims astatine the existent ideological strain that animates parts of Silicon Valley, an exotic operation of biohacking, transhumanism, fascistic politics, and A.I. boosterism. (There’s nary equivalent to the trollish coder turned far-right influencer Curtis Yarvin successful the film, but helium could person guest-starred arsenic himself.)
Smith’s efficaciously appalling Venis, emanating manic frat-boy energy, wearing choky black-monochrome outfits implicit his optimized physique, is the group’s villain among villains. At the opening of the film, helium rolls retired caller features connected Traam that see a benignant of perfected generative-A.I. instrumentality that tin make “unfalsifiable” deepfake videos. As helium proceeds to a play of leisure, the remainder of the satellite descends into chaos caused by his app’s viral disinformation tally amok. Fake footage sparks existent terrorism, sectarian attacks, slope runs, and wide murder, yet Venis is solipsistically disdainful of the remainder of humanity, asking Randall if 8 cardinal different radical could perchance beryllium arsenic “real” arsenic they are. The 4 billionaires way quality headlines from their screens and statement whether Venis should crook Traam’s tools off. Their motivation calculations are rationalist, successful a warped, Sam Bankman-Fried-like way: letting escaped artificial wide quality volition yet pb to billions of perfected, virtualized, immortal quality lives, truthful anyone’s interim concerns astir information oregon morals are conscionable p(doom) levels retired of whack. Venis, arsenic the 1 who’s opened the Pandora’s box, is besides a reflector mentation of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, minus Altman’s pretensions to caution.
“Mountainhead” develops into a claustrophobic play that recalls the movie adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, “Leave the World Behind,” successful which 2 families uneasily stock a rental location arsenic an apocalypse unfolds abstractly extracurricular their doors. It’s besides a benignant of twenty-first-century “Waiting for Godot,” with billionaires sitting astir anticipating their technological savior, an omnipotent A.I. that volition surely supply them with immortality, if it doesn’t thrust quality hordes with pitchforks to their beforehand doorway first. The enactment turns mildly slapstick: Hugo attempts to acceptable retired hors d’œuvres and cadge concern deals amid the slow-boiling mayhem; Venis boxes with a tree. Some of the bleakest drama comes from Armstrong’s deployment of Silicon Valley argot. Randall notes that a failed execution has prompted “a ton of big, large learnings.” Hugo—whom the others telephone Soup, for “soup kitchen”—agonizes, successful a country that Schwartzman endows with twisted poignancy, that, dissimilar the others, helium has failed to “go unicorn.” Venis entertains adjacent the astir ghoulish ideas with the question “Can we tally a model?” Jeff is the group’s lone dependable of reason, but he, too, has an economical inducement to play along: arsenic helium puts it, “The worse the disease, the much invaluable the cure.” (As the situation deepens, helium surpasses Randall successful the billionaire rankings.) Armstrong is simply a bard of creatively profane dialogue, which present serves to seizure the tech entrepreneurs’ incandescent operation of arrogance and puerility: astatine the opening of the film, Venis announces that Traam’s caller tools are going to marque the “printing property look similar pre-cum.”
Armstrong is close astir however unelected tech oligarchs wield power implicit billions of people’s perceptions of reality. Musk tweaks the X algorithm oregon Altman tinkers with ChatGPT’s inputs and abruptly accusation travels differently, on paths inclined toward their biases. Zuckerberg pivots toward A.I. and abruptly our feeds are filled with falsified, deceptive slop. Even earlier the movie was released, immoderate tech fans were criticizing it arsenic an unfairly antagonistic portrayal of the industry; astatine slightest Silicon Valley “hasn’t switched to apathy,” 1 Reddit commenter wrote. But what if the other of apathy is simply a content that entrepreneurs tin tally nations amended than elected officials, the aforesaid statement that led to Musk hacking done the national authorities with his bureau named aft a meme. In Armstrong’s Schadenfreude-rich telling, each that powerfulness leaves tech founders personally miserable: the Randalls of the satellite look to person thing to unrecorded for but surviving longer. Tech wealthiness present looks adjacent little appealing than that of the Roy household (the expensively beige décor is adjacent uglier). “Mountainhead” lacks the arch dryness of “Succession”—the code is lighter and looser, much relative Greg than Roman Roy. But determination are plentifulness of different hallmarks of the HBO bid successful the film, including the fetishistic footage of achromatic cars rolling into driveways (this time, it’s much apt to beryllium an environmentally affable Rivian) with stony-faced passengers successful the back, a carnivalesque soft soundtrack by Nicholas Britell, and the characters’ wont of ending sentences with a halting “yeah.” Plus, Armstrong gave america a glimpse of the Mountainhead milieu toward the extremity of “Succession,” erstwhile the Roy family’s institution was acquired by Lukas Matsson, an emotionally vacant Scandinavian streaming entrepreneur with a idiosyncratic doctrine of “privacy, pussy, pasta.”
Naturally, the “Mountainhead” pack decides that, alternatively than halt Traam’s destructive A.I., they should exploit the turmoil and, for deficiency of a amended phrase, “take implicit the world,” each from the information of their hideaway—or, arsenic Venis dubs it, “humanity’s planetary HQ.” They collude with coup leaders implicit Zoom and origin brownouts successful Europe, lone to autumn into an improvised crippled against 1 of their own. The antics that ensue are amusing, but determination isn’t overmuch incisiveness successful the progressively farcical dog-eat-dog dénouement. The astir potent moments thin to hap connected the periphery of the action, successful snippets featuring the billionaires’ downstairs courtier class, the assistants and lawyers who hustle astatine the corners of Hugo’s mansion. A pistillate representing Venis’s institution committee is the lone idiosyncratic who tin marque him blink. Jeff’s distant, polyamorous narration with his woman astir makes 1 consciousness atrocious for him. Still, Armstrong ne'er truly manages to make meaningful stakes oregon consequences for these characters, whose wealthiness insulates them adjacent from 1 another’s depredations. We cognize the broligarchs are selfish, dissatisfied, and sociopathically unconcerned with the remainder of humanity, due to the fact that we’re suffering from their beingness present successful existent life. What we don’t cognize is what to bash astir it, fixed that they stay arsenic unreachable arsenic a cliffside mansion, shaping the globe’s destiny from their phones. ♦
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