In case we don’t already spend sufficient time fascinated by the sociopathic tech billionaires who’re going to kill us all, HBO has a brand new film premiering on May 31 about 4 such males. The movie—referred to as Mountainhead—is from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong and is thus not precisely sympathetic to the reason behind accelerationist, techno-libertarian transhumanists. But even a biting satire requires that we spend an disagreeable period of time with these ghouls and their unhealthy concepts.
Jason Schwartzman performs Hugo, an investor and app developer who’s ashamed that he, in contrast to his billionaire associates, is simply value $550 million. As a method to flex what he does have, Hugo invitations three masters of the universe to his model sprawling new modernist ski bunker in Utah for a weekend of poker and manly bonding. This is a few type of annual ritual, a gathering to make merry and toss round the subsequent nice horrible notion about humanity’s future. This time, although, the outdoors world begins to intrude.
One of the visitors, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), is the brash younger founding father of a globally dominant social media firm that has simply launched an AI instrument so efficient it’s disrupting the world order. Venis tries to bluster previous all the apparent catastrophe brought on by his creation, however as his telephone informs him of 1 violent rebellion or authorities collapse after one other—brought on by disarmingly convincing AI movies and pictures—his assured strut takes on a nervous wobble.
A former pal turned rival, Jeff (Ramy Youssef), arrives for the weekend smug in the information that he owns a expertise that may simply establish Venis’s AI fakes, thus mitigating their affect. This tech is sought by the U.S. authorities in the hopes that it’ll curb the shortly spreading disaster. But Venis desires to purchase it first, so he can handle its impact on his cool new toy. Jeff appears to have not less than a slight conscience about the recklessness of his fellow billionaires, however he’s additionally in wielding petty energy at this little occasion.
Venis has an ally in Randall (Steve Carell), the elder statesman of the group, a zillionaire enterprise capitalist whose curiosity in accelerationism—significantly of the variety that may transfer the world towards a post-human epoch—is partly guided by a terminal most cancers prognosis that he refuses to simply accept. In essence, we now have a stand-in for Peter Thiel (if Peter Thiel was dying) going to bat for a barely altered Mark Zuckerberg, with two composite characters rounding out the quartet.
Mountainhead was made in a rush—it was filmed in March—and seemingly written as a response to the nightmarish takeover of presidency by tech freaks like Thiel and Elon Musk. These have certainly been sensational, horrifying occasions, ones value masking in scripted type. With his detailed information of the towering vanity and stupidity of the oligarch class, Armstrong would appear the best interpreter of all this insanity.
And at occasions, Mountainhead delivers. It is grimly amusing to look at these terrible males plot and scheme in the means we think about guys like them—pseudo-philosophical, amoral, satisfied that anybody who isn’t them is nothing however an NPC—do right here in the actual world. That type of scary affirmation—imagined however ringing with fact—will be cathartic, simply because it was on Succession.
But jolts of gallows-humor satisfaction can solely carry Mountainhead to date. Given that that is filmed leisure, we should sooner or later get to an precise story, which is the place Armstrong falters. The plot, reminiscent of it’s, emerges after tensions amongst the group rise to absurd heights—although I think Armstrong would possibly argue they’re not so absurd in any respect. Either means, a vital credibility is lacking right here. It’s turns into too straightforward to see Mountainhead as a mere unexpectedly made comedy, an opportunity for these 4 actors to placed on a type of play, in which they will curse and spar and toss round plenty of inside-baseball lingo.
No one is actually delving into the human coronary heart of those characters—save, perhaps, for Smith as the buffoonish, overgrown dorm-room nerd who refuses to grapple with the tangible penalties of his innovations. He keenly renders a geek thrilled (and nonetheless, deep down, shocked) to have turn into a god, his antipathy for the world clearly sourced from the most adolescent of grievances. Youssef tries to plumb some depths too, although his character is the most confusingly rendered—it’s not fairly plausible that Jeff would ever have been such a keen participant in this cabal.
Maybe the few moments when Mountainhead does tackle a chilling relevance—when it appears to choose at one thing nightmarishly actual—are sufficient to justify the sillier stuff. And, we should sadly admit, that foolish stuff could not really be that foolish. This 12 months, the sociopathy of the tech business—or, not less than, a faction of it—led to a cult murder spree, motivated in half by the so-called rationalist mindset that Armstrong is skewering right here. To say nothing of the many individuals mortally harmed by, say, DOGE gutting varied authorities applications.
If nothing else, Mountainhead is an introduction for these not terminally on-line to the profoundly unsettling ethos that has captured the chambers of cash and energy in this nation, and round the world. As Saturday night time leisure, it falls quick. And it’s not as informative as a journalistic lengthy learn. But not less than it’s one thing, the slightest of pushes again towards the folks making an attempt so offhandedly to grind us into soylent.
