Jesse Armstrong has returned with what appears like a horribly addictive feature-length spin-off episode from the prolonged Succession Cinematic Universe – although with out Succession solid members. It is ready in an opulent Utah megalodge which winds up resembling the Dr Strangelove warfare room, combined with the condo from Hitchcock’s Rope. Mountainhead is a super-satirical chamber piece in regards to the deranged, cynical and facetious mindset of the uber-wealthy, the sort of people that take into consideration historic Rome every single day, although not about Nero and his violin. It might not have the dramatic richness of Armstrong’s TV meisterwerk whereas the pure testosterone of this all-male predominant solid (minus any Shiv figure) is oppressive – although that’s type of the purpose. The pure density of weapons-grade zingers in the script is a marvel.
Our heroes are 4 unspeakable American tech plutocrats, a billionaire boys membership with one mere centi-millionaire who isn’t as much as “bill” standing; this beta-male cuck of their peer group is nicknamed “Soup Kitchen” due to his poverty, and he’s their keen host. They are precisely the type of folks with whom legacy media aristocrat Logan Roy (performed in Succession by Brian Cox) would as soon as grit his enamel and take conferences, vainly hoping for funding. These masters of the universe are getting collectively for an alpha bros’ hang-slash-poker-weekend, razzing and bantering with one another with lethal seriousness about their respective wealth ranges, at this mega-lodge that known as Mountainhead. As one visitor asks: “Is that like The Fountainhead? Your interior designer is Ayn Bland …?”
They are: Venis, performed by Cory Michael Smith, a preening Elon Musk determine who has simply dropped a complete new set of AI-creation instruments to his social media platform which is permitting anybody to create explosively divisive deepfakes, and so the blokes’ telephones at the moment are pinging with information of imminent world warfare. Steve Carell performs grey-haired Randall, the ageing member of the group, an OG investor and a type of Peter Thiel sort who’s repressing ideas about his most cancers prognosis, calling his physician “stupid” and pondering importing his consciousness to the online as a posthuman. Ramy Youssef performs Jeff, the relative liberal of the group; he’s a really un-Bezos Jeff, like a Biden-era Mark Zuckerberg with a contact of Nick Clegg. Jeff’s workforce have developed a filter permitting customers to tell apart actual content material from pretend which Venis desires to purchase, possibly as a result of it’s worthwhile, or possibly to suppress it. Jeff retains acidly mocking his comrades in methods that may remind you of Shiv or possibly Roman. And Jason Schwarztman is Soup Kitchen, or Soups, who yearns pathetically to deliver out a brand new meditation app.
As chaos spreads on the market in the super-poor world, the blokes – who in any case despise nation states with their tiresome regulatory interventions – focus on the necessity to “coup out” South American international locations and even the US. Things get even darker from there. Throughout all of it, the impossibly subtle backchat continues, like background radiation, with the blokes competitively insisting on how hilarious all of it is: “Nothing means anything – and everything’s funny!” Yet Venis earnestly insists his platform can save the world: “Once one Palestinian kid sees some really bananas content from one Israeli kid – it’s all over!” The guys are pushed largely by macho recklessness; they detest “AI-doomism and decelerationist alarmism”.
So what occurs when the chaos they’ve unleashed on the world’s methods truly impacts on them personally in their Mountainhead hideaway? Well, it’s a flaw in the movie. At one level, Soups turns the faucet on and no water comes out. How is that this disaster going to work out? Just a little perfunctorily, because it occurs. More than any comedy and even movie I’ve seen just lately, that is film pushed by the line-by-line want for fierce, nasty, humorous punched-up stuff in the dialogue, and narrative arcs and character improvement aren’t the purpose. But as with Succession, this does a extremely good job of persuading you that, sure, that is what our overlords are actually like.
