‘Mountainhead' Review: While We Go Down, They Bro Down

New York Times

2 days ago

Over four seasons of 'Succession,' the creator, Jesse Armstrong, told the story of people who control the world by selling ideas: the Roy family, who ran and fought over a media and entertainment empire. Toward its end, as their business was sold to a tech entrepreneur, 'Succession' suggested that power was shifting, and that the future belonged to silicon hyperbillionaires.
In his film 'Mountainhead,' which premieres Saturday on HBO, that future has arrived, and it is both terrifying and ridiculous — not unlike our present. In the scabrous story of a weekend getaway for four tech-mogul frenemies, Armstrong finds that our new bro overlords are rich targets for satire, though when it comes to depth, nuance and insight, their story has nothing on the Roys'.
As 'Mountainhead' begins, countries around the globe are erupting in hatred and sectarian violence, fueled by A.I.-generated propaganda. This chaos is the whoopsie of Venis (Cory Michael Smith), a chuckleheaded social-media entrepreneur whose company pushed a half-baked software update that gave bad actors around the world the sudden ability to create unfalsifiable deepfake videos. (The name 'Venis,' a seeming portmanteau of 'venal' and 'penis' that is pronounced 'Venice,' is Armstrong's sensibility in five letters.)
The world is burning. But in the snowy, Randian-named retreat that gives its name to 'Mountainhead,' Venis has arrived to chill with his boys. Jeff (Ramy Youssef) has developed possibly the only A.I. capable of weeding out the dangerous fake videos from Venis's company. Randall (Steve Carell), a self-styled philosopher-exec, tosses around terms like 'Hegelian' in a way that makes you wonder if he's ever finished a book. And Hugo Van Yalk (a wonderfully debased Jason Schwartzman), the owner of the property, is a meditation-app developer nicknamed 'Soup' — for 'soup kitchen' — because his net worth is a mere half billion dollars.
The edgy bro-down that ensues is fueled by unspoken rivalries and schemes. Venis wants Jeff to sell him his A.I., which would allow him to call off the apocalypse without having to do an embarrassing recall of the update. Randall, who has received a concerning diagnosis, is keen on Venis's plan to usher in the 'transhuman' era by uploading people's consciousnesses to the cloud. Soup wants someone to fund his anemic wellness app and finally add a zero to his humiliating nine-digit wealth.
The film centers almost entirely on this quartet. (Like the Roys, they mash up aspects of several real-life analogues — Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg and more.) The narrow focus matches their perspective: The four men see themselves as the only real people in the world, while the other eight billion of us are NPCs. At one point, Venis asks Randall, 'Do you believe in other people?' The only reasonable answer is, 'Obviously not!'
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