Genre: Drama
Premise: Four of the richest people in the world, all of whom work in the tech sector, meet up for a weekend getaway, while the tech tools they’ve created incinerate the world.
About: Succession creator Jesse Armstrong wanted to make a movie about the tech bro world, specifically the “lack of self-awareness” prevalent with most tech billionaires. Word on the street is that he wrote and directed the film all within a six months period. The movie is now available to stream on HBO Max.
Writer: Jesse Armstrong
Details: 110 minutes
This was one of the movies I was looking forward to the most this year. Jesse Armstrong, of Succession fame, getting his first big shot at a feature, staying squarely inside of his wheelhouse by tackling another bunch of richy-riches. Felt like a home run.
We’ll get into whether it lived up to the hype in a second but first, I have to mention the strange Rotten Tomatoes scores for this film. As of today, it has an 80% critic score and a 25% audience score.
This is the oddest scoring pair I’ve seen on the reviewing aggregate site. Whenever there’s this much disparity between critics and audiences, it’s ALWAYS for some political reason. Yet, while politics are mentioned in the movie, it is blatantly apolitical. Which makes the low audience score even harder to reconcile.
Maybe this will make sense once we delve into the plot.
Mountainhead follows four tech bros: Randall (Steve Carell, aka Jeff Bezos), Jeff (Ramy Youseff, aka Mark Zuckerberg), Venis (newcomer Corey Michael Smith, aka Elon Musk), and Souper (Jason Swartzman).
Although the movie doesn’t do the greatest job explaining how these four know each other, they’re apparently best friends who come together every year to celebrate how many billions of dollars they have. This year, they’re meeting at Souper’s new mansion up in the mountains.
We know exactly how much money each of them has thanks to one of the most forced scenes that’s ever been written. In it, the group goes to the top of a mountain, takes off their jackets so they’re bare-chested and, in some sort of ritual, Souper writes their net worth on each of their chests. Venis has the most money. Randall is second. Jeff is third. And poor Souper isn’t even in the billion dollar club. He only has 600 million.
The crux of the plot is that Venis has just released new AI software that allows people to make realistic videos of whatever they want. Everybody starts making videos of charged subject matter and, because these videos are indistinguishable from reality, others believe they’re real, charging up the opposition, who then start attacking these people in real life.
But the real story emerges later in the script when Randall, who has just learned his cancer has returned, starts manipulating the group so that all of their resources can be put towards digitizing the human brain as soon as possible, allowing humans to upload their consciousness to a computer. Randall has been assured by Venis that, if Venis has the help of everyone here, he could digitize the human brain within five years.
The only problem is that Jeff doesn’t want to help Venis in this area. Keep in mind, nobody knows that Randall is terminal. That’s a secret. So, when Randall learns that Jeff isn’t on board, he soft-launches the idea of killing Jeff to the other two. At first, they don’t love it but Randall is convincing and soon, they plan the murder for that night. Unfortunately, none of these guys has the capacity or know-how to murder someone, which results in all sorts of attempted-murder hijinks.
Okay, so here’s the thing.
I have complicated feelings about this movie, lol.
At first, I hated it. But then it grew on me. And while I’m not convinced that it ever made its way into “good” territory, it definitely stayed within “interesting” territory throughout. It’s not like any other movie you’ve seen and, whether you liked Mountainhead or not, there’s value to that.
The main problem with the movie is the forced camaraderie.
Matt Damon notoriously called this out after Good Will Hunting. He said that the worst thing in movies was characters pretending to be friends despite it being clear that the actors had never spent a day with each other in their entire lives.
That’s why Good Will Hunting felt so genuine. All the actors in it really were friends. At the same time this was going on, Swingers came out. That movie also had a bunch of real-life friends in it. And you could see that on screen. The chemistry was genuine throughout.
When you watch Mountainhead, you’re very aware of what Matt Damon is talking about. These guys just showed up on set and had to act like they’d known each other their whole lives. So when the lack of chemistry bumped up against the writing, that inauthenticity became apparent.
Which is why I believe the movie grew on me. This was all shot on one set, this house. That means they shot it linearly. And you can feel that. Once we get to that second half of the movie, the chemistry got better, the timing got better, the line-reading got better. That’s because the actors had been hanging out for 15-20 days.
This brings us to the murder plot and that’s when the script almost salvaged itself. I know that portion of the movie was working because when Randall, Venis, and Souper sneak into Jeff’s bedroom to smother him with a pillow, I was insanely anxious. I was so nervous that Jeff was going to wake up and say, “What the fuck are you guys doing??” If the viewer is that anxious, your script is working.
From there, Armstrong makes a bold choice (spoilers). Normally, in a movie like this, they’d kill Jeff. And then they would have to figure out how to explain it away afterwards. But Armstrong doesn’t go in that direction. He makes all three of these tech bros the Pink Panther. They’re bumbling morons who have never had to do anything physical or real in their lives. They exist only on their computers. So they don’t know how to kill someone.
Which felt genuine to me. I know that Armstrong is being satirical here. But it actually makes sense that these people would be clueless about how to murder someone. There’s this sequence where they have Jeff locked in the sauna and they’re so clueless about how to kill him that they come up with this idea to pour gasoline in the room and then light it on fire.
But once they get the gasoline, they don’t know how to get it in there. So they pour it on the floor, then get a squeegee, and start pushing the gasoline in with the squeegee. It’s so ridiculous but it’s also kind of hilarious.
I think back to American Beauty and how it was critical for Sam Mendes to get two weeks of rehearsal time with the actors. Remember, he came from a stage background so practice was a huge part of his process. Kevin Spacey repeatedly mentions the importance of that rehearsal time as it allowed them to really figure out the characters.
That’s what Mountainhead needed. I would go so far as to say that if Armstrong had two weeks with these actors ahead of time, this is a vastly better movie. Cause you can see it on the screen as the actors get more comfortable with each other. In that end scene where they’re all at the table, after having forced Jeff into a deal that gave Venis a major part of his company, the timing and chemistry with all the little side remarks between everyone, was worlds apart from where they were in that awful mountain top scene.
I started this review thinking I was going to give this a “wasn’t for me.” But it’s too interesting of a failure for me to do that. I value movies that are different, that are not like other movies out there. And although Mountainhead has its faults, I still think it’s worth checking out.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the stream
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: Armstrong is not a believer in meeting people in real life for research. He says he’s too anxious to meet people in the real world. He likes to do his research the old-fashioned way, through reading. He read a ton of stuff about real life tech bros and used little bits and pieces of them to fill in his characters.
