“Mountainhead” Review: Jesse Armstrong's satire with acidity habits

Jesse Armstrong's rough dark satire Mountain head takes place in a man's house worthy of bond villains, which is located on a snow-covered slope in Utah, where there are four tech brothers for a poker weekend in the boys. The air of the forced jokularity is almost as thick as the hypercompetitive tension and fog of the undeserved privilege among the Frenemien. The bitchy excavations fly from the beginning than each of the four jockey for position and seriously show how disinterested it are in chaos with social media that breaks far away from their enclave. The collective assets of the broses are so great that their nickname for the group's needy and desperate boxing bag, “Souper” (Jason Schwarzman), began as a mocking reference to soup kitchens because it is only a half billion Malary.

Each are spectacularly wealthy plutocrats from the Silicon Valley, whose mania and hanging of the real titans are very similar and would never be tolerated if they did not have as many zeros in their crypto letters. Randall (Steve Carell) is the oldest, a bloated pseudo-intellectual, which Hegel and Marcus Aurelius calls so often that he probably has its own substance about seasteading. The clumsy bullying clown of the group is Venis (Cory Michael Smith), the thin-skinned and soulless CEO of the social media company, whose just published Deepfake tools drive the racist and political dispute that hunts the world up.

The least defined character among the central fours is the AI ​​developer Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who seems to be less openly monstrous and the next thing this group has for a voice of morality. But for Armstrong's pitch -black sensitivity, Jeff's conscience is a pretext that does not extend further as occasionally soft bumps in Venis or asked: “Hey, did you see that?” About another atrocity. While Jeff was signed something, it would also have contributed to having a stricter actor in the role. In addition to Carrell's ability to project a toxic uncertainty with a narrowing of his eyes to project Smith's annoying icy cruelty and Schwarzman's funny silence, Youseff's appearance does not matter when his character's self -binding villain deserves.

By consequences Consequence With another acid catchment comedy about a slightly different sub-group of 0.01 percent, Armstrong sticks to a kind of satire that he knows well. Mountain head'S Tech Bros have many pathologies that are familiar from the Roy family ConsequenceBut although only two years have passed since the final of this show, the landscape of wealth and power depicted by Armstrong has changed – although it feels more like a submissive than according to progress. Malignant and powerful like the roys, the brothers of Mountain head Had this business of Old-Tech Clan and Net Worth destroyed with the patch of an algorithm, followed by laughter.

Armstrong is more invested in the use of coded language and significant status to pursue finely calibrated conflicts between terrible people than to provide a narrative of action. And that is probably easier for him to get away in an independent film in which he is on the topics Consequence But without worrying about how to incorporate cliffhangers for a season finale.

In Mountain headArmstrong contains a transparent convenient development: Jeffs Ki accidentally offers exactly the kind of fake news monitoring that Venis could save from calling the hectic politicians to close what Jeff describes as his “4chan on -acid” tool before the world implodes. But the film's momentum does not depend on whether Jeff sells to Venis. Armstrong's perspective assumes the desolation of Armstrong's perspective that the world, whatever these men do, will be the worse for it. This becomes clear when the bros see the positive of the government break and civil wars. “You will always kill some people,” notes Randall when her telephones transmit unrest and mass murders.

This satire remains more about the effects of what these would -be -nietzschan -Supermänner say than what they do. During a particularly terrifying route, Randall and Venis turn into fantasies about using the chaos of the moment to rewrite the story with themselves as the emperors of the new world. Armstrong paps her dialogue with the keywords (“P-Thom”, “founding energy”, “singularity”), loved the futurist-fascist techno-libertarian, whose exhaustion with analog life on earth makes her dissatisfaction. If there is a morality here, the only thing that is worse than a competitive billionaire is bored.