Mountainhead
On: JioHotstar
Dir: Jesse Armstrong
Cast: Cory Michael Smith, Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef
Rating: 3/5
By all accounts, I’m willing to wager a bet, writer-creator Jesse Armstrong could’ve charged a bomb to simply continue making his stunningly Shakespearean series on the media industry, Succession (2018-23), for HBO, forever.
Such was its global appeal as a conversation starter. It’s to his creative integrity that he stopped at the fourth season. Knowing that he had precious little to add, without overstaying audiences’ welcome, perhaps.
Which is the sort of call that makes one curious about which lunar crater Armstrong would land on, next.
Well, it’s a miniature feature called Mountainhead, set among four tech-bro, corporate giants, in a mountain estate — shot simply within 20-odd days.
Basically, he’s filmed a play, that would probably seem as exciting on stage, as on screen (no matter what its size).
And with anticipation so high — since it’s the successor to Succession, after all — nothing, no matter how good, is likely to match!
In Bollywood terms, call it the ‘Shaan effect’, if you like. As in the perfectly fine entertainer that followed Ramesh Sippy’s Sholay!
The audience’s response, eventually, being an outcome of expectations, what else. And therefore, plot-wise, I felt slightly shortchanged/underwhelmed, sitting through Mountainhead, post the first half, once the characters have been suitably introduced.
It’s only when I caught this 140-minute, mock-ironic black comedy, all over again — this time, not as fixated with the story; or comparisons, in my head, to the mountain resort, episode five (Kill List) of Succession S04 — that I could truly appreciate this one-room talkie.
More so, as commentary on tech and AI, plus power in the hands of a self-appointed few, who run both — it stands among the most elementally important, dramatic think-pieces on the way the world is what it is!
The title Mountainhead, like figureheads in a fictional “Mount Techmore” of course, is a play on Ayn Rand’s book Fountainhead.
Which, along with Atlas Shrugged, if you’ve read at too early an age, you were surely blindly bowled over by Rand’s libertarian idea of objectivism. Rand was also scathingly writing in direct response to collectivism/socialism of her times.
With writer-director Armstrong as the stinging fly on the fancy walls around four of the world’s richest Silicon Valley dudes, Mountainhead shows you the flip side of Rand’s individualistic capitalism.
Or, how the planet, essentially its future, can’t be left to the high IQ brains of a small bunch of billionaire brats, with clear psychopathic tendencies, access to subservient heads of states, and a smug outlook towards the world that they can’t visualise humans as anything but potential markets!
How politically relatable is Mountainhead? As much as Trump, pushed up by plutocrats. The movie’s timely enough that had it dropped only a year later, it could seem dated!
Such is the accelerated pace of change caused by AI, anyway. Let it be the oddball document of the progressively transient times then.
All the more, because you can spot obvious glimpses of tech public-figures with each caricature in the film, that’s hard to wipe off your visceral memory.
Even as they chill among buddies in bed, they speak in start-up jargon, as if walking-talking LinkedIn posts, podcast episodes, or in their boardrooms, of course.
Yeah, you can kinda stretch and see bits of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates in an ever so slightly humanitarian tech-bloke, Jeff (Ramy Youssef).
Or perhaps a touch of a thought-leader type, Peter Thiel, in Steve Carell’s Randal, kinda obsessed with “uploading human consciousness”.
Likewise, with the host with the least, Souper (Jason Schwartzman), who’s only worth $521 million, because he deals with a lifestyle consumable app; could there be a hint of, say, Reed Hastings (Netflix) in him? I don’t know.
At the centre of this power-drunk, badmaash company going berserk is a $230 billion dollars’ worth, new-age, social media entrepreneur Venis (Cory Michael Smith), looking, stereotypically, a cross between Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.
This megalomaniac’s unleashed an AI tool that’s set the world on fire. It makes/spreads deepfakes. Those deepfakes cause global unrest, including in Gujarat, where people are killing each other, imagining desecration of religious sites.
Venis’s buddy and former partner Jeff’s got an antidote to this AI. While I write this, the piece waiting to be read on my phone is the latest Time magazine cover story, on how OpenAI/ChatGPT’s Sam Altman has come up with a similar antidote that verifies humans, since we can’t distinguish them from AI anymore!
That’s how topical is the dystopian Mountainhead, for all its obvious exaggerations. But then again, forget science fiction — as we speak, doesn’t truth seem stranger than non-fiction?
And Armstrong is armed with that unique eye to suitably capture this strangeness.
Just recall that final episode from the first season of Black Mirror, The Entire History of You, about neural implants in human eyes that make you rewind/replay everything you’ve watched.
It’s the only episode that Armstrong wrote. It remains the most memorable short from the class-act series still. Besides, there’s Succession, of course, that had me waiting for this film since its announcement.
For, nobody writes lines to rival Aaron Sorkin (The West Wing), simultaneously diving this deep with such elegant cynicism into intrigues that humans with lust for power are capable of; that is nothing short of House of Cards (by Beau Willimon).
Those two political shows haven’t been matched in the same scale yet. Its successor should come from Armstrong. I’d equally wait for it for as long. He must patiently take longer than this movie, though.
