Now TV’s listing for the new HBO film Mountainhead categorises it as “factual”. This is a clear mistake—it is a fictional satire depicting four tech billionaires on a boys’ weekend trip, directed by Succession creator Jesse Armstrong. But cynics might reasonably observe that there are plenty of real-life tech barons who are just as juvenile, callous and narcissistic as Armstrong’s characters. Might it be part-documentary after all?
Yet the film is more concerned with the opposite dynamic: the descent from the realistic into the fantastical. Upon arriving at Hugo’s (Jason Schwartzman) titular mountaintop holiday home, named after Ayn Rand’s libertarian bible Fountainhead, discussions with his old pals Randall (Steve Carell), Venis (Cory Michael Smith) and Jeff (Ramy Youssef) quickly descend into futurist fancies. “How close are we to going full transhuman?” “We gotta get off planet!” Imagine Yuval Noah Harari and Peter Thiel narrating an acid trip.
Even with the resources at their disposal, their prescriptions and predictions sound unhinged—not so much bluster as believing their own hype. Achieving unlikely, exponential success with particular products has inculcated these men with a certainty that all ambitious visions are not merely possible but inevitable, irrespective of any barriers in the way. As Logan Roy might say on Succession, these are not serious people.
Their detachment from reality is most directly spelled out during a walk in the nearby snowy hills, when Venis asks Randall if he “believes in other people... like 8 billion people as real as us?” Randall replies, “Obviously not.”
Back in the real world, the new AI feature on Venis’s social media platform is causing widespread violence, as hyper-realistic deepfakes convince citizens to retaliate against non-existent atrocities. Randall has cancer. Jeff’s partner seems ambivalent about him. Their techno-escapism is evidently motivated by a desire to retreat from these immediate problems—and the guilt and fear they might otherwise inspire.
The strength of their delusions is such that they countenance literally killing one another to keep their dreams alive. Venis needs Jeff’s AI safety tools to slow down the carnage wrought by his platform and thereby placate both his corporate board and the US president. But Jeff is holding out and, of the four, displays the most scepticism and cautiousness (his friends brand him a “decel”). This provokes Randall, who is hopeful Venis’s success will advance the uploading of one’s mind to the cloud, so his consciousness can outlive his ailing body. Randall thus leads an effort to murder Jeff in his sleep which—spoiler alert—is thwarted by clumsiness and Jeff’s desperate efforts to strike a deal. In a classic Armstrong move, the film ends with further negotiations and intrigue.
To some extent, it’s nice to see tech bros given the full-blown movie villain treatment. The problem is that, despite Now TV’s incorrect label, the film isn’t quite real enough. The pervasive sense of unreality is evidently intentional—Armstrong’s statement on the delusions of the ultra-wealthy—but with less screentime to work with in film, compared to the multi-episode seasons of prestige TV, the barrage of buzzwords, the rapid descent into chaos and the lack of lucid moments make the characters seem exaggerated and the plot feel unbelievable. With a tight production schedule of approximately six months, it may simply have been underdeveloped. At what point do the wild imaginings of the characters simply become undisciplined screenwriting?
The film reminded me of the similarly promising-but-overdone 2023 novel The Future by Naomi Alderman, who appeared alongside Armstrong at Hay Festival in May. The Future depicts a similarly out-of-touch clique of ultra-rich tech entrepreneurs who are obsessed with doomsday prepping. They purchase a supposed prediction system for civilisational calamities, which soon tells them to head to their bunkers. Their detachment against a backdrop of destruction is very similar to the situation in Mountainhead. But it turns out—again, spoiler alert—the prediction system was a ruse devised by their underlings and assistants, who bundle their bosses off to a remote island to clean up the mess wrought by their corporate malfeasance. The uplifting ending is too neat and the analysis of power relations too thin.
A notable difference between the two texts is the spotlight afforded to the tech elite’s workers, assistants and content creators, who become Alderman’s protagonists but only momentarily interrupt the action in Mountainhead. In the latter, an opportunity to give the audience a more clear-eyed cypher went begging—there is no “cousin Greg” equivalent—as did a political point: hope lies in a different generation and a different class.
One complaint about Succession was that there were no likeable characters, but this tended to come from people who didn’t get past the first few episodes. Over time, one could live with the characters’ unlikability because they were complex and deftly portrayed, so in any one episode you could find yourself empathising with one and loathing another, only to switch moments later. Armstrong presented the Roys as fully rounded human beings, and the indictment of their class was not softened by that fact but reinforced by it.
Conversely, Mountainhead’s characters are just as contemptible but more two dimensional, seemingly because Armstrong isn’t used to packing such nuance (plus the plethora of jokes and plot twists) into an hour and forty-five minutes. At times, the tone can feel more like Netflix’s bluntly didactic Don’t Look Up, a far cry from the Shakespearean refinement of Succession. It’s a shame, for tech bros deserve a searing critique that can’t be so easily dismissed as caricature.
