4 tech billionaires stroll right into a mansion. It sounds just like the setup for a punch line, but it surely additionally types practically your complete conceit behind “Mountainhead,” a savagely entertaining however considerably shallow new satire written and directed by Jesse Armstrong, the creator of “Succession.” The movie, which is streaming on HBO’s Max, is a form of chamber play, its stage a modernist citadel in Utah—the Mountainhead of the title—overlooking snowy peaks. The gamers are a quartet of associates, or, extra precisely, frenemies, who resemble a mishmash of real-world Silicon Valley founders. Steve Carell performs Randall Garrett, the group’s Peter Thiel-esque mentor who, not in contrast to the late Steve Jobs, has most cancers that his physician tells him is incurable. (“Incorrect,” he claims. He’s ready to add his mind to “the grid.”) Jason Schwartzman performs Hugo Van Yalk, the founding father of a “life-style tremendous app.” He’s the proprietor of Mountainhead and the host of the gathering however is by far the poorest of the crew, price a mere 5 hundred and twenty-one million. Cory Michael Smith performs Venis (as in “Venice,” not “penis”) Parish, an Elon Musk-Mark Zuckerberg stand-in who runs a social platform referred to as Traam. Ramy Youssef is Jeff Abredazi, a barely extra high-minded entrepreneur, who’s constructed an artificial-intelligence-driven moderation software referred to as Bilter—social media’s “guardrails,” he calls it. However, in Armstrong’s universe, tech isn’t morally within the black, and the individuals who create it are not any higher than despots—inept ones, at that. Even any accelerationist beliefs they maintain are finally secondary to the mission of boosting their internet worths, the one actual terrain on which they care to compete.
“Mountainhead” skewers the determine of the heroic male entrepreneur, a Machiavellian archetype that Aaron Sorkin and David Fincher might have inadvertently helped to assemble with “The Social Community,” their 2010 movie fictionalizing Zuckerberg’s founding of Fb. (“Like ‘Fountainhead’ Mountainhead?” Jeff asks, drawing the already apparent Ayn Rand connection.) Armstrong has mentioned that he rushed to launch the movie out of a need to seize “the bubble of time” that we’re presently residing in, and with the timeliness of his venture he has set himself fairly the problem. It’s not straightforward to create fictional tech tycoons outré sufficient to captivate an viewers once we’re inundated day by day with information of Musk, a distractable investor, inveterate gamer, and reported ketamine abuser (he denies this) who has fathered at the least fourteen offspring with a number of ladies. The persona foibles on show in “Mountainhead”—spouting off about Hegel, fixating on cooking a turbot, even paranoiacally sending spies after a girlfriend—pale subsequent to these in our actuality. The movie is stronger when it goals on the present ideological pressure that animates components of Silicon Valley, an unique mixture of biohacking, transhumanism, fascistic politics, and A.I. boosterism. (There’s no equal to the trollish coder turned far-right influencer Curtis Yarvin within the movie, however he might have guest-starred as himself.)
Smith’s successfully appalling Venis, emanating manic frat-boy power, carrying tight black-monochrome outfits over his optimized physique, is the group’s villain amongst villains. Initially of the movie, he rolls out new options on Traam that embody a type of perfected generative-A.I. software that may create “unfalsifiable” deepfake movies. As he proceeds to a weekend of leisure, the remainder of the world descends into chaos brought on by his app’s viral disinformation run amok. Pretend footage sparks actual terrorism, sectarian assaults, financial institution runs, and mass homicide, but Venis is solipsistically disdainful of the remainder of humanity, asking Randall if eight billion different individuals might probably be as “actual” as they’re. The 4 billionaires observe information headlines from their screens and debate whether or not Venis ought to flip Traam’s instruments off. Their ethical calculations are rationalist, in a warped, Sam Bankman-Fried-like approach: letting unfastened synthetic normal intelligence will finally result in billions of perfected, virtualized, immortal human lives, so anybody’s interim issues about security or ethics are simply p(doom) ranges out of whack. Venis, because the one who’s opened the Pandora’s field, can also be a mirror model of OpenAI’s Sam Altman, minus Altman’s pretensions to warning.
“Mountainhead” develops right into a claustrophobic drama that remembers the movie adaptation of Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, “Depart the World Behind,” during which two households uneasily share a rental home as an apocalypse unfolds abstractly exterior their doorways. It’s additionally a form of twenty-first-century “Ready for Godot,” with billionaires sitting round anticipating their technological savior, an all-powerful A.I. that may absolutely present them with immortality, if it doesn’t drive human hordes with pitchforks to their entrance door first. The motion turns mildly slapstick: Hugo makes an attempt to set out hors d’œuvres and cadge funding offers amid the slow-boiling mayhem; Venis bins with a tree. A few of the bleakest comedy comes from Armstrong’s deployment of Silicon Valley argot. Randall notes {that a} failed homicide has prompted “a ton of massive, huge learnings.” Hugo—whom the others name Soup, for “soup kitchen”—agonizes, in a scene that Schwartzman endows with twisted poignancy, that, in contrast to the others, he has did not “go unicorn.” Venis entertains even probably the most ghoulish concepts with the query “Can we run a mannequin?” Jeff is the group’s solely voice of motive, however he, too, has an financial incentive to play alongside: as he places it, “The more serious the illness, the extra useful the treatment.” (Because the disaster deepens, he surpasses Randall within the billionaire rankings.) Armstrong is a bard of creatively profane dialogue, which right here serves to seize the tech entrepreneurs’ incandescent mixture of conceitedness and puerility: on the opening of the movie, Venis pronounces that Traam’s new instruments are going to make the “printing press seem like pre-cum.”
Armstrong is true about how unelected tech oligarchs wield management over billions of individuals’s perceptions of actuality. Musk tweaks the X algorithm or Altman tinkers with ChatGPT’s inputs and immediately data travels in another way, alongside paths inclined towards their biases. Zuckerberg pivots towards A.I. and immediately our feeds are stuffed with falsified, misleading slop. Even earlier than the movie was launched, some tech followers had been criticizing it as an unfairly detrimental portrayal of the business; at the least Silicon Valley “hasn’t switched to apathy,” one Reddit commenter wrote. However what if the alternative of apathy is a perception that entrepreneurs can run nations higher than elected officers, the identical argument that led to Musk hacking by means of the federal authorities along with his company named after a meme. In Armstrong’s Schadenfreude-rich telling, all that energy leaves tech founders personally depressing: the Randalls of the world appear to have nothing to dwell for besides residing longer. Tech wealth right here appears to be like even much less interesting than that of the Roy household (the expensively beige décor is even uglier). “Mountainhead” lacks the arch dryness of “Succession”—the tone is lighter and looser, extra cousin Greg than Roman Roy. However there are many different hallmarks of the HBO collection within the movie, together with the fetishistic footage of black automobiles rolling into driveways (this time, it’s extra prone to be an environmentally pleasant Rivian) with stony-faced passengers within the again, a carnivalesque piano soundtrack by Nicholas Britell, and the characters’ behavior of ending sentences with a halting “yeah.” Plus, Armstrong gave us a glimpse of the Mountainhead milieu towards the top of “Succession,” when the Roy household’s firm was acquired by Lukas Matsson, an emotionally vacant Scandinavian streaming entrepreneur with a private philosophy of “privateness, pussy, pasta.”
Naturally, the “Mountainhead” gang decides that, quite than halt Traam’s damaging A.I., they need to exploit the turmoil and, for lack of a greater phrase, “take over the world,” all from the security of their hideaway—or, as Venis dubs it, “humanity’s international HQ.” They collude with coup leaders over Zoom and trigger brownouts in Europe, solely to fall into an improvised plot towards certainly one of their very own. The antics that ensue are amusing, however there isn’t a lot incisiveness within the more and more farcical dog-eat-dog dénouement. Essentially the most potent moments are likely to happen on the periphery of the motion, in snippets that includes the billionaires’ downstairs courtier class, the assistants and legal professionals who hustle on the corners of Hugo’s mansion. A lady representing Venis’s firm board is the one one who could make him blink. Jeff’s distant, polyamorous relationship along with his girlfriend nearly makes one really feel sorry for him. Nonetheless, Armstrong by no means actually manages to create significant stakes or penalties for these characters, whose wealth insulates them even from each other’s depredations. We all know the broligarchs are egocentric, dissatisfied, and sociopathically unconcerned with the remainder of humanity, as a result of we’re affected by their presence right here in actual life. What we don’t know is what to do about it, provided that they continue to be as unreachable as a cliffside mansion, shaping the globe’s destiny from their telephones. ♦
