In MOUNTAINHEAD, four billionaires meet at a mountain lodge for a “tech bros weekend” while the world collapses due to the technologies they unleashed. This is brutal satire, slicing through the carefully created mirage of genius and altruism to show these people as what they are: psychopaths.
Tech billionaire “Venis,” as he calls himself (played as a cross between Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk by Cory Michael Smith), has a massive platform called Traam, whose latest update allows AI deepfakes so real they’re being used by terrorists and political groups to sow chaos. Banks are folding, countries are imploding, and ethnic violence is running rampant around the globe. He attends a weekend getaway with his buddies at a mountain lodge called Mountainhead owned by “Supes,” who got rich on apps but is constantly being ragged on because he hasn’t cracked a billion in net worth yet, making him feel like a failure and worship his swaggering billionaire buddies. Randall is a venture capitalist who makes all this possible (played as a stilted and smug Peter Thiel by Steve Carell); he’s also dying and hopes technology will save him by allowing his consciousness to be uploaded to the cloud to live in a digital heaven. Finally, there’s Jeff (played as a version of Sam Altman by Ramy Youssef), something a voice of conscience in the group, whose net worth is skyrocketing because his AI moderation tool is mitigating some of the worst of what Traam is doing.
Over the weekend, it becomes clear that Venis needs Sam’s AI moderation tech, and when Sam refuses to sell, the others turn on him.
As a satire, the movie works beautifully for the most part. Basically, the movie takes the public personas of rich and powerful tech billionaires and puts them in a private context, which only makes them sound even more ridiculous. The world is literally collapsing due to these men, but all they care about is how to profit off it, citing maxims about creative destruction; the worse they make things, the more they rationalize they’re doing the right thing, seeing themselves as the man who invented the wheel. A self-righteousness that extends all the way to believing they should be justified in directly committing murder. The comedy of the satire, however, is more depressing than funny much of the time. There is a tense dirtiness to watching this movie; I felt like I needed a shower for my brain afterwards.
The film is getting a lot of bad reviews from movie watchers, much of it due to it being instantly politicized. Is this criticizing Musk? Oh no but he’s my hero, I gotta give it a 1-star review. It’s part of the horror of billionaires having so much money and power that there are many, many people who buy into the myth and tech utopia BS and wind up worshiping them–to the point they think billionaires should run the world. On the other hand, the backlash against the 1-star reviews is drowning legit criticism of the movie as being frustrating, which it can be, and that is the greatest trick of the satire, when it turns the knife on the viewer in the last act. Those expecting a big comeuppance will be disappointed. As in real life, there is no justice. Just billionaires laughing as their net worth climbs and the world burns.
Overall, I liked MOUNTAINHEAD but didn’t love it. It’s not as powerful as films like SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, and its single running comedic note, while sharp, gets monotonous. Instead of offering hope about justice, the movie rubs what you hate right in your face to the last minute.
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