‘Mountainhead’ Packs a Sobering Warning Within Its ‘Tech Bros Gone Wild’ Satire

Although “Mountainhead” is being tossed out as Emmy bait — landing on the eligibility deadline — the HBO movie won’t be everyone’s cup of tea. Yet the underlying warning in “Succession” creator Jesse Armstrong’s film exploring the toxic combination of oligarchs, AI and disinformation merits some sober reflection beyond its “Tech Bros Gone Wild” satire and silliness.

Armstrong obviously gave the world a lot to chew on (and HBO a bunch of Emmys) with “Succession,” especially with its chapters about how the show’s fictional but very Murdoch-like media dynasty, the Roys, played a pivotal role in anointing a U.S. president. The series may have been cynical, but much of that felt grounded in reality.

It’s hard to tell yet, frankly, how true that is of “Mountainhead,” which Armstrong wrote and directed, but parts of the movie feel disturbingly plausible. And if even a fraction of its over-the-top musings about technology and masters of the universe come to pass, it’s an unsettling vision of what the future might hold — of technology that could do massive harm to society, and uber-rich overlords who, faced with that prospect, for the most part don’t care.

In some ways resembling a filmed play — just with a 21,000-square-foot mountain retreat, complete with panoramic views, as its enormous stage — the movie focuses on four tech titans who assemble for a guys’ weekend. Trading insults and revealing their odd personality quirks, they also monitor unfolding events from afar, with the world thrown into chaos by highly realistic deep-fake technology that one of them markets, creating tension inside the aerie as well as beyond it.

Boasting an aggregate worth of more than $340 billion, the quartet — played by Steve Carell, Ramy Youssef, Jason Schwartzman and Cory Michael Smith — obsess over their paper wealth, but perhaps most unnervingly, appear callous to whatever collateral damage their pursuit of it might unleash.

Wholesale ethnic violence here? An assassination or political coup there? Hey, it’s just a cost of doing business.

From that perspective, “Mountainhead” recalls an ahead-of-its-time HBO production from 1997, “Weapons of Mass Distraction,” made when TV movies represented a much more robust genre. Written by the late Larry Gelbart (known for “MAS*H” and “Tootsie,” among others), the story involved two feuding media moguls going to battle over acquiring a football team, using their assets as oversized toys to bludgeon each other, while ruining the lives of an ordinary couple (surrogates, naturally, for the rest of us) amid the back and forth.

It’s not an accident the new film’s title rhymes with Ayn Rand’s novel “The Fountainhead,” though that’s just one of Armstrong’s little touches that seem too cute and coy. Nor is it really worth speculating about which real-life billionaires provided inspiration, but there’s clearly a whole lot of Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg in them, which probably helps explain why so much of their behavior is weird, awkward and just plain cringy.

Armstrong said at the premiere that he wasn’t looking to dive back into the world of the super-wealthy, but it’s understandable why he’d be drawn to such a target-rich environment filled with excess and eccentricity. Like the “Succession” gang, all the money and privilege in the world can’t compensate for broken psyches and nagging insecurities, though it does produce some clever banter, like a reference to one of the bunch as “Dark Money Gandalf.”

At its core, “Mountainhead” paints a picture of the dangers associated with uncurbed technology, which threatens to upend our lives in less ostentatious ways than the pyrotechnics envisioned in “The Matrix” or “The Terminator” but almost equally destructive — in this case, completely undermining any sense of shared reality or the ability to fully trust what we see with our own eyes.

Think about those deep-fake videos of the new Pope making the rounds, then imagine what happens with a couple generations of tech perfecting that, in the hands of amoral billionaires far more concerned about maintaining their share price than who might die because of what they’re peddling.

Throw in having the ear of world leaders, as the players in “Mountainhead” and their real-life counterparts do, and unlike the action-packed movies cited above, nothing here really sounds like science fiction. When one member of the group boasts, “We have the resources to take over the world,” it might not be mere tech-bro bravado.

Focusing on the shortcomings of “Mountainhead,” though, risks missing the forest for the trees — or more accurately, the fact that we might not know if what we’re seeing really is a forest, as opposed to some AI-created replica of one, before we’ve inadvertently burned down the whole damn thing.

As noted, Armstrong explores those provocative ideas in a less-than-wholly-satisfying package, partly shackled by a structure that, by sequestering the central characters, essentially holds the audience hostage in a confined space with this less-than-fantastic foursome.

Of course, the key players in “Succession” could be pretty odious as well, but the series format allowed them to breathe and develop over time in a way that’s difficult to achieve condensed into a TV movie.

Focusing on the shortcomings of “Mountainhead,” though, risks missing the forest for the trees — or more accurately, the fact that we might not know if what we’re seeing really is a forest, as opposed to some AI-created replica of one, before we’ve inadvertently burned down the whole damn thing.

“Mountainhead” premiered May 31 on HBO and Max.

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