‘Mountainhead’ assessment: ‘Succession’ creator Jesse Armstrong brings your worst tech nightmares to life

For his feature-length directorial debut Mountainhead, Succession creator Jesse Armstrong treads acquainted territory.

Like Succession, Mountainhead turns its gaze on the wealthy and highly effective, this time satirizing tech moguls within the vein of Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Sam Altman. The movie mimics Succession formally, too, boasting its documentary-style cinematography, in addition to a thrumming rating from Succession composer Nicholas Britell. And naturally, it comes with its fair proportion of WTF-worthy turns of phrase. (Ever heard the phrase “room cuck”? Nicely, now you will not be capable of neglect it.)

However with all these similarities to Succession, Mountainhead usually fails to flee that present’s shadow, even because it tries to the touch on present occasions in a means that units it aside.

What’s Mountainhead about?

In a plot that feels ripped proper from the headlines, Mountainhead follows the “Brewsters,” a gaggle of 4 uber-wealthy tech bros whose poker night time will get derailed by international unrest. Amongst them is the richest man on the planet, Venis (Cory Michael Smith), who’s the founding father of social media platform Traam. As Mountainhead begins, Traam has simply launched a brand new suite of AI instruments able to creating hyper-realistic deepfake photographs and movies. The following wave of misinformation causes violence and monetary instability worldwide, none of which Venis needs to take any accountability for.

As a substitute, Venis hopes to accumulate tech from fellow poker night time attendee Jeff (Ramy Youssef), who has created a filter able to distinguishing AI from actuality. But Jeff is hesitant to promote, each as a result of Traam is a “racist and shitty” platform, and since his internet price is skyrocketing within the face of all of the chaos.

Overseeing the Venis-Jeff standoff are Randall (Steve Carell), a “dark money Gandalf” who’s additionally the “Papa Bear” of the group, and Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), nicknamed Soup Kitchen by the others as a result of he is the one non-billionaire of the group. Only a paltry millionaire!

Hugo’s huge Utah mansion — named Mountainhead after Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead, due to course a millionaire would pull that transfer — turns into the perch from which Mountainhead‘s Brewsters watch the world crumble. There, remoted from everybody, they start to dream up methods to take additional benefit of world pandemonium, and possibly even take the world for themselves.

Mountainhead channels present fears about tech moguls and AI.

Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith, Steve Carell, and Jason Schwartzman in “Mountainhead.”
Credit score: Macall Polay / HBO

If Mountainhead‘s story of tech billionaires looking for a good greater piece of the world’s pie comes throughout as eerily related, that is by design. Armstrong developed, wrote, and shot Mountainhead over a span of mere months in an effort to create a movie that speaks as a lot to the current second as doable.

The impact is sobering, with Armstrong expertly stoking the flames of AI anxieties. Right here, AI is not simply getting used to create faux Katy Perry Met Gala appears to be like or bizarro child movies. As a substitute, it is prompting worldwide battle in what feels just like the inevitable endpoint of the know-how.

Engineering all of it are the Brewsters, who learn like an amalgam of a number of key tech figures — Musk, Altman, Zuckerberg, and even Sam Bankman-Fried. Musk particularly looms giant. Characters’ plans to transform the U.S. authorities are harking back to Musk’s involvement within the Trump administration’s Division of Authorities Effectivity (DOGE), though he stepped down on Might 29. Elsewhere, Venis and Randall’s obsession with transhumanism calls to thoughts Musk’s Neuralink ambitions, whereas their assertion that Earth was a great “starter planet” gestures out to Musk’s work on SpaceX and hopes to colonize Mars.

On high of highlighting the sorts of concepts and applied sciences that make Silicon Valley tick proper now, Armstrong additionally captures the self-aggrandizing patter of tech bro converse. From references to Plato and Kant to questions of “first principles,” Carell, Schwartzman, Youssef, and Smith make a meal out of each smarmy line. After 5 seconds with every of them, you will be itching to punch their lights out — and that feeling solely intensifies on the movie’s runtime ticks by.

Mountainhead stumbles in the beginning, however a minimum of it finds its footing for a hysterical third act.

Steve Carell and Ramy Youssef in “Mountainhead.”
Credit score: Macall Polay / HBO

But for all it will get proper about unbearable tech figures, Mountainhead falters on the subject of a lot of its precise dialogue and character work, two issues Succession persistently excelled at. Early sequences function ridiculously clunky exchanges laying the movie’s tech-heavy groundwork, together with one monologue from Jeff that presents each single doable drawback with Traam’s AI in painstaking element. Nobody, not even Youssef (in any other case hilarious within the movie) could make that data dump sound pure.

That very same sense of clunky awkwardness permeates Mountainhead‘s first act because the characters (and the performers) get into the groove. Whereas Hugo’s friends settle in, their continuous tech converse and volleys of insults really feel like what you’d get when you pushed Succession simply off its rhythm.

Fortunately, Mountainhead actually finds its footing in its third act, which shifts focus from the Brewsters’ reactions to the skin world to a extra inside, instant battle. To say rather more can be to spoil Mountainhead‘s most scrumptious surprises, however the movie’s leap into an absurdist crime caper is a welcome shot within the arm — and the jolt Mountainhead must step away from the Succession comparisons (even when they arrive roaring again within the film’s last minutes).

Mountainhead‘s fast turnaround time makes it an interesting experiment in and of itself: How possible is it to create a film that is so steeped in present occasions that it will not really feel dated or overdone by the point it comes out? However in the long run, it isn’t the barrage of references to AI and different tech that stick within the head. As a substitute, it is that final, extra contained part that proves to be probably the most fascinating a part of our journey as much as Mountainhead, in addition to probably the most salient commentary on tech moguls the movie has to supply.

Mountainhead premieres Might 31 at 8 p.m. ET on HBO and HBO Max.