Tech-bro satire Mountainhead is an insufferable disappointment

The Guardian

2 days ago

Picture this: a group of very rich people gather at an ostentatiously large, secluded retreat. The SUVs are black, tinted, sleek. The jets are private. The egos are large, the staff sprawling and mostly unseen, the decor both sterile and unimaginably expensive. This is the distinctive milieu of Succession, the HBO juggernaut which turned the pitiful exploits of a bunch of media mogul failsons into Shakespearean drama for four critically acclaimed seasons. It is also the now familiar aesthetic of a range of eat-the-rich satires plumbing our oligarchic times for heady ridicule, if increasingly futile insight – The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Knives Out: Glass Onion, Parasite, The White Lotus and the recent A24 disappointment Death of a Unicorn to name a few. (That's not to mention countless mediocre shows on the foibles of the wealthy, such as this month's The Better Sister and Sirens.)
So suffice to say, I approached Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong's first post-series project about four tech billionaire friends gathering for poker as one's AI innovation wreaks havoc on the globe, with a sense of pre-existing fatigue. The market of ultra-rich satire is, to use the logic of Armstrong's characters, saturated. (Or, to use their language: 'I would seriously rather fix sub-Saharan Africa than launch a Sweetgreen challenger in the current market.') There's more than a whiff of Argestes, the second-season Succession episode at a billionaire mountain retreat, to these shots of private cars pulling up to a huge chalet hugged by snowcapped peaks. And though Armstrong, who solely wrote and directed the film, continues his avoidance of easy one-to-ones, there's more than a whiff of Elon Musk to Venis (Cory Michael Smith), an AI company CEO and the richest person in the world with a tenuous grasp on reality, a stupendous sense of nihilism and unrepentant need to assert his own virility (the landscape, he notes, is 'so beautiful you can fuck it').
In some ways, it's a relief to see tech bros, especially AI entrepreneurs, reach full, unambiguous movie-villain status. Already, there is a competently made movie for the Doge era, and Armstrong, as ever, can nail hairpin turns of phrase on the sentence level. But as much as I hate to contribute to the 'anti anti-rich content' discourse, on which much ink has already been spilled, I can't say Mountainhead refuted any expectations of reality fatigue; watching Venis, host Soup (Jason Schwartzman, playing the least rich of the group, and thus nicknamed after a soup kitchen), Marc Andreessen-esque venture capitalist Randall (a miscast Steve Carell), and fellow AI wunderkind Jeff (Ramy Youssef) brainstorm plans for the post-human future as more of a slog than if I were high-altitude hiking with them.
To be honest, I'm not sure any classic satire – as in, using irony or exaggeration to highlight hypocrisies, vices and stupidity – could work for the second Trump administration, at once dumber and more destructive than the first, nor the release of generative AI on the public. Both require a level of hypernormalization and devaluing of reality that make the idea of enlightening ridiculousness feel, well, ridiculous. Even the most inventive writers and performers will struggle to craft humor out of beyond farcical political figures and norms degraded beyond recognition (see: Mark Ruffalo's effete and grating parody of Trump in Bong Joon-Ho's Mickey 17).
Succession, which ran from 2018 to 2023, soared on its 'ludicrosity', to borrow a made-up term from its billionaire patriarch Logan Roy, with a precise critical distance from reality. The deeply cynical, psychically fragile, acid-tongued media conglomerate family loosely based on the Murdochs were just far enough removed from the real Fox News timeline. Its inverted morals, barren decadence and high irony the right angle of fun-house mirror to become, in my view, the defining show of the Trump era, without ever mentioning his name.
But we are in a different era now, and the same tools feel too blunt to meet it. Mountainhead shares much of the same DNA as Succession, from Armstrong to producers to crew, to trademark euphemisms (why say 'murdered' when you can say 'placeholdered'?) It was completed on an extraordinarily fast timeline – pitched in December 2024, written (partly in the back of cars while scouting locations) this winter, filmed in Park City in March and released by end of May – giving it the feel of a streaming experiment for the second, more transparently oligarchic Trump term. How fast can you make an HBO movie? How can you satirize current events moving at a speed too fast for any ordinary citizen to keep up, let alone be reasonably informed?
'The way it was shot naturally simulated Adderall,' Youssef told the Atlantic, and it shows. Mountainhead plays out less like a drama between four tenuously connected, very rich friends, and more like a random word generator of tech and finance bro jargon – decel (deceleration, as in AI), p(doom) (the probability of an AI apocalypse), first principles. (Armstrong, by his own admission, binged episodes of the All-In podcast, which features prominent investors and Trump's AI/crypto czar David Sacks.) The backgroup of this billionaire conclave are series of escalating crises from Venis's guardrail-less AI that feel themselves AI generated – women and children burned alive in a mosque, a deluge of deepfakes that imperils governments in Armenia, Uzbekistan, Japan, Ohio. Italy defaults on its debt. Should they take over Argentina? Buy Haiti? 'Are we the bolsheviks of a new techno world order that starts tonight?'
The deluge of contextless, characterless chaos – Succession's Kendall would call this dialogue 'complicated airflow' – succeeds in highlighting the depersonalizing effect of Silicon Valley's many innovations. None of this feels real, because none of this is real to these characters. Millions of No Real Persons Involved. But that is undercut by a pervasive sense of self-importance. Like the irksome climate-change satire Don't Look Up, directed by Succession executive producer Adam McKay, the exaggerated hijinks of Mountainhead reveal a deep self-assurance of its politics that border on smug. It's not that it doesn't, like Succession, attempt to humanize these figures – each billionaire has an Achilles heel of morality or mortality, though by now the fallibility of Musk-like figures is far from a revelation. It's that the drama between these billionaires felt frictionless – mostly unchallenged by secondary figures and impervious to other perspectives, at once predictable and insufferable to watch.
Every human has their unique foibles and contradictions, but Mountainhead found itself too enthralled by figures who are no longer interesting, if they ever were. I found myself longing for more than two minutes with the girlfriend, the ex-wife, the assistant, the board member, let alone one of the many staff at the house – anyone to de-center a perspective that has already claimed far too much oxygen in the public sphere. For a Real Person to get involved. But that may be beyond this flavor of satire, now in an era of diminishing returns.