The diploma to which Mountainhead, HBO’s new black dramedy from Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, will make you giggle relies upon nearly completely on how a lot information you eat about tech billionaires who see themselves as übermensch chosen by destiny to form the arc of historical past. The extra time you’ve spent listening to Silicon Valley sorts wax poetic about actuality being a simulation, “universal basic compute,” and the way humanity is a “biological bootloader” for artificial intelligence, the much less Mountainhead’s CEO characters come throughout as being amusing caricatures. However in the event you’re a part of the fortunate bunch that has by no means bothered listening to billionaires insist that they’re going to attain immortality in preparation for colonizing Mars, Mountainhead may strike you as an incisive send-up of the uber-wealthy oligarch class.
Particularly on this second the place we’ve all been in a position to watch a number of the world’s richest tech overlords prostrate themselves earlier than Donald Trump in hopes of amassing much more energy, the film’s depiction of tech bros flirting with the thought of taking on the world appears so believable that it nearly doesn’t work as satire. However every of Mountainhead’s lead performances is infused with a manic, determined power that makes the movie really feel like an articulation of the concept, whenever you strip all of the self-aggrandizing mythos away, billionaire founders are simply individuals with sufficient cash to make their anxieties and insecurities everybody else’s downside.
Although it’s narrative territory we’ve seen Armstrong discover earlier than, Mountainhead isn’t any Succession. In comparison with Armstrong’s extra expansive episodic work, there’s a breathless urgency to his first characteristic that displays the speed with which he wrote and shot it. However the movie does make you recognize how harmful and divorced from actuality immediately’s titans of trade are typically when left to their very own gadgets.
Set nearly completely in a palatial lodge nestled excessive up within the Utah mountains, Mountainhead revolves round a quartet of absurdly rich frenemies who come collectively for a weekend of relaxation, leisure, and metaphorical dick measuring whereas the remainder of the world hurtles towards a doomsday state of affairs.
On some degree, social media tycoon Venis (Cory Michael Smith) is aware of that the brand new generative AI instruments rolling out on his Twitter-like platform, Traam, have the potential to incite chaos by feeding individuals deepfaked footage designed to maintain them indignant and endlessly scrolling. Venis has seen the information reviews about a number of outbreaks of violence focused at immigrants and ethnic minorities. He’s additionally heard commentators linking his creation to a widespread erosion of belief on a societal degree. However along with his web price at an all-time excessive, it’s simple for the twitchy CEO to disregard all that unhealthy press and dismiss the disturbing imagery flooding Traam.
Much like Mission: Unimaginable — The Closing Reckoning, Mountainhead frames AI’s potential to obfuscate the reality and manipulate individuals’s perceptions of actuality because the form of menace that ought to give everybody pause. However slightly than telling a narrative about people racing to cease a tech-driven apocalypse, Armstrong is way more concerned about exploring the methods during which synthetic intelligence’s potential for hurt is immediately related to the worldviews of those that create it.
Venis isn’t the one tech mogul able to roll his eyes as Traam’s AI continues to stoke unrest and violence across the globe. Nearly all of his closest buddies — a small group of males who name themselves the Brewsters — really feel precisely the identical means. James (Steve Carell), a steely Steve Jobs kind who refuses to just accept the fact of his terminal most cancers analysis, sees Traam’s recognition as an indication that Venis is on the suitable path and setting himself as much as nook the market on digitizing human consciousness inside a decade.
Regardless that Jeff (Ramy Youssef), the creator of a rival AI toolset that may reliably determine deepfakes, has gone on the podcast circuit understandably trash-talking Venis, he can’t deny that Traam’s harmful slop has led to an exponential development of his personal valuation. And because the “poorest” member of the Brewsters, multimillionaire well being nut Hugo / “Soup Kitchen” (Jason Schwartzman), is greater than keen to cosign mainly something his buddies do. A few of it boils all the way down to Soup’s want for an inflow of money for his subsequent enterprise enterprise — an ill-conceived wellness and meditation app. However the deeper reality that Armstrong repeatedly highlights is that teams just like the Brewsters at all times want somebody round who’s keen to play a recreation of boar on the floor or eat a soggy biscuit to make themselves really feel like they’re all having a great time.
The will to have a great time is ostensibly why Soup invitations the opposite Brewsters to come back spend the weekend at Mountainhead, his drearily stylish trip house that reeks of latest cash and a juvenile obsession with Ayn Rand. However as soon as the group has gotten collectively and despatched their assistants — many of the film’s sparingly few ladies characters — away, it isn’t lengthy earlier than the boys’ deep-seated resentments of each other begin effervescent to the floor. And when the unnamed president of the US calls up Venis and Jeff to debate how the Traam deepfake state of affairs is getting worse by the minute, the group takes it as an indication that they may be taking a look at a possibility to play and win a recreation of actual IRL Danger.
Picture: HBO
Given how comparatively few locations it bodily takes its characters, Mountainhead does a stable job of not feeling like a claustrophobic play about delusional billionaires beefing on high of a mountain. Few of the Brewsters’ digs at one another are really laugh-out-loud humorous, however what’s spectacular is how every of the characters appears like a definite embodiment of the tradition that gave delivery to the trendy superstar tech founder archetype. Armstrong needs us to see these individuals as ghouls who’re past excessive on their very own provides, but in addition as profoundly damaged males whose fixations on biometrics and being seen as sigma men converse to a deeper sense of inescapable inadequacy.
Issues like James’ tense relationship along with his private physician and the odd, vaguely homoerotic recreation of wits Venis and Jeff begin to play in Mountainhead’s third act are intriguing. However they’re additionally a part of what makes the movie really feel prefer it might need been extra compelling as a miniseries with sufficient time and house to point out us extra of how the Brewsters transfer by the world and what in addition to their cash would make these 4 males need to spend time with each other.
Simply when Mountainhead begins to get juicy and unhinged, it rushes to a dramatic climax that feels right-minded, however untimely. It’s nearly as if Armstrong means to go away you unhappy as a means of emphasizing how individuals just like the Brewsters seldom get what they actually deserve. As a chunk of eat (and ogle) the wealthy social commentary, Mountainhead works effective in the event you’re craving a cheeky, surface-level indictment of tech barons who fancy themselves as gods. However in the event you’re searching for one thing extra dramatic and substantive, you may be higher off simply studying the information.
Mountainhead additionally stars Hadley Robinson, Andy Daly, Ali Kinkade, Daniel Oreskes, David W. Thompson, Amie MacKenzie, and Ava Kostia. The film debuts on HBO Could thirty first.