- Once portrayed as brilliant but flawed innovators, tech leaders are increasingly portrayed as frightening villains whose ambitions can do more harm than good.
Zoom: This fall’s tech billionaire films span every genre, from documentaries to thrillers.
- đź’» “Social calculation” Aaron Sorkin’s follow-up to his 2010 hit, “The Social Network,” opened Friday with Jeremy Strong playing a more sinister Mark Zuckerberg in the Facebook whistleblower’s leak in 2021. Sorkin takes some cinematic liberties with the timeline and other details.
- 🚀 “Musk”, The four-hour documentary (including a 10-minute intermission) about the rise of Elon Musk is showing in select theaters and opens nationwide Friday. The film’s choppy rollout, directed by Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney, won critical acclaim at the Venice Film Festival and was the subject of legal threats from Musk’s team.
- 🩸 “You can see everything” released Friday, is an experimental documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim that follows former Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before her incarceration. Studio A24 claims that an “intimate portrait of an enigmatic criminal becomes a mind-blowing three-year journey into the abyss.” (Learn more about the film.)
- 🤖 “Artificial”, a drama directed by Luca Guadagnino, stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and hits theaters on Christmas Day. In the film, “(Garfield) portrays Altman as a manipulative, power-hungry psychopath who lies as easily as he breathes and will use anyone, anytime, anywhere to get what he wants,” reports The Verge. Studio NEON calls it “the story of OpenAI and a two-decade-long artificial intelligence arms race.” …As technology becomes more powerful and valuable than anyone ever imagined, a battle rages over who should control the technology that could change the destiny of humanity. »
These projects represent a decisive turning point a far cry from some earlier films and documentaries about Silicon Valley, like “Jobs” and “Something Ventured,” which celebrated the ingenuity of founders and venture capitalists.
- “With technology, it was a fiery love affair,” says Margaret O’Mara, a University of Washington historian who studies Silicon Valley. “And when you fall in love, you fall in love quickly.”
- “Our popular understanding of Silicon Valley and the products it makes has changed dramatically.”
Zoom out: Hollywood reflects the public’s growing disillusionment with the tech industry.
- Polls show that Americans of all ages are quickly becoming dissatisfied with AI and believe it is evolving too quickly. Two in three Americans believe social media is bad for democracy, according to a Pew Research Center poll.
- “Popular films are a mirror of current social anxieties,” says writer and editor-in-chief of Quarterly film JM Tyree. Right now, “people are thinking about the consolidation of power in the hands of a few at the expense of the many.”
The plot: Tech founders make compelling on-screen villains, Tyree says.
- They bring together two archetypes: the ruthless businessman corrupted by greed, as seen in films like “Citizen Kane” and “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and the mad scientist who is morally ambiguous and employs science and technology recklessly, as in “Metropolis” or “Frankenstein.”
- Plus, their eccentricities make for good entertainment.
The bottom line: O’Mara, the Silicon Valley historian, notes: “One thing I’ve learned from studying the history of rich people is that extreme wealth makes you weird.” »
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