Mountainhead Review: A Succession for Tech Titans in Jesse Armstrong's Satirical HBO Movie

With just the push of a button, Venis (Cory Michael Smith) introduces the final version of an exciting new suite of features to Traam, a social media platform with a global reach. Allowing users to create realistic AI-generated videos, the innovations have already been causing political turmoil in their limited beta form. But Venis decides to go for it anyway. He acts on impulse in the interest of change and, as he's quick to point out, for the lolz. When the consequences start to arrive, he'll watch them on his phone, where they won't seem quite real. Later, Venis will confess that he's not sure that most people really exist anyway, so what does it matter?

Written and directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong, Mountainhead is similarly set in a world of the rich and powerful who've seemingly ascended to a sphere where they no longer have to worry about any consequences. The title comes from the name of the newly constructed home built high in the Rocky Mountains by Hugo (Jason Schwartzman), who's opening it up for a weekend with his old friends/fellow tech titans. (Any resemblance to Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead is not coincidental.) These include Venis, Jeff (Ramy Youssef), and Randall (Steve Carell), whom the other, younger members of the crew refer to affectionately as "Papa Bear." Hugo's own nickname, "Soup Kitchen," is less kind, a reference to the fact that his net worth has never crossed the billion-dollar mark. He's stalled out in the mid-hundred millions, but Hugo is hoping to change that by using the weekend to pitch Slowzo, a "lifestyle super-app" that just needs a little seed money to get going.

That this violates the spirit of a weekend supposedly dedicated to snacking, poker, drugs, and other bro-ish pursuits — a getaway with "no deals, no meals, and no high heels" — doesn't seem to concern Hugo too much. This isn't a crew overly concerned about rules anyway. So when Traam's new feature starts wreaking havoc all over the globe, the quartet mostly treats it like a development with pros and cons that should be managed and exploited. And why not? They're obviously the smartest guys around. 

Besides, it's probably not that bad. Sure, the Italian economy might look a little wobbly but, as Randall notes, "No country with an internationally traded consumer cheese has ever defaulted on its national debt." Fond of dropping references to Plato and Hegel, Randall is capable of making such pronouncements with such confidence that others may never notice that what he's saying only sounds smart. (Less convincing is a later moment when Venis pronounces a video clip fake because "heads don't explode like that.") Of course, the others don't really lack confidence, either. When, in one of the earliest consequences of the Traam feature rollout, the government of Argentina collapses, Hugo is more than happy to offer his services as the new leader. They've been working to remake the world in their own image. Maybe this is just the "great turn of the wheel" they've been waiting for.

7.1

Mountainhead

at HBO

Like

• Shrewd study of seemingly untouchable tech titans
• The actors relish Armstrong's cutting dialogue
• Avoids making the characters cartoonish

Dislike

• The characters still aren't as deep as they could be
• A twist narrows the scope of the story

The best moments of Mountainhead capture the breathtaking arrogance of this way of seeing the world without making its characters seem cartoonish. They might constantly think in galaxy brain terms, but they also have the power to make sweeping changes and to watch the consequences play out from a great distance even when they're not in a lodge in the clouds. Reassuring themselves, and each other, that they're taking the long view and acting in the best interest of humanity allows them to justify, well, just about anything.

The characters all come from the same rarefied tech world space and bear some resemblance to that space's real-world models, most obviously Venis, who shares many of Elon Musk's obsessions and tics, including a desire to upload consciousness to the cloud and leave the Earth behind for Mars. The cast has tremendous fun with Armstrong's signature cutting, crude, clever dialogue. Youssef plays Jeff as the one member who hasn't fully abandoned his conscience (yet), and Carell even makes it hard not to feel a bit for Randall, who's fighting what he's been told is an unwinnable battle with cancer. But, unlike Succession, the feature-length running time of Mountainhead doesn't allow much time to get beneath the surface of these characters, however memorably they're played.

That would be less of a problem were it not for the turn Mountainhead takes in its second half. It's a swerve that's best left unspoiled, but also one that, after the initial surprise passes, has the effect of making the film feel smaller than it otherwise might. Some of the most effective moments in the first half capture the profound detachment of the film's central characters. Videos of fake violence lead to horrifying acts of real violence, but they may as well be watching changes happening in a petri dish. It's a continuation of one of Succession's most effective devices, the moments when the series would offer glimpses of dramatic events unfolding at a great remove from the seemingly untouchable characters at the core. When the focus shifts to the relationships between Jeff, Venis, Hugo, and Randall and the fragile balance of power they share, it feels unavoidably less consequential.

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That doesn't mean the film's not compelling to the end, however. It offers a memorable, and alarmingly plausible, look inside the sort of room where whims and games of one-upmanship can lead to decisions with profound and far-reaching consequences and terms like "fungible human asset" get used to reduce dire actions to intellectual exercises. That Mountainhead falls short in finding the story's human heart might be an unavoidable flaw. You can't find what's not there.

Premieres: Saturday, May 31 at 8/7c on HBO and Max
Who's in it: Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Ramy Youssef, Cory Michael Smith
Who's behind it: Jesse Armstrong
For fans of: Succession, dark comedies