There's
something suspicious about a movie that might uses slogans as
dialogue. This one lays out its competing democratic and
capitalistic ideals by such shorthand. For example: "Never
underestimate radical vision," the motto of NURV, the
Microsoft-like corporation at the center of Antitrust, headed
by the Bill Gates-like Gary Winston (Tim Robbins). When Gary points
to the motto on a drawing board during a meeting with his worker
bees on the NURV Campus, their eyes light up. When he tells them
that the computer business is "binary -- you're a one or a
zero, alive or dead!", they sit up a little straighter in their
seats and nod their heads in understanding. And when he exhorts them
to "Surprise me, challenge me, defy me! Defy yourselves!",
they applaud. A few even jump to their feet as if in a fit of
admiration. Amen and hallelujah! This guy is a god!
Yeah,
right. Unless you haven't been getting out much lately, you probably
know that the most common movie villains these days -- aside from
the usual standby Nazis -- are lawyers and computer executives,
especially those who are obscenely wealthy. Robbins adopts an
appropriately Anti-Christ-like posture in Antitrust. He's
soft-faced and slightly rumpled, wearing khakis and geek-boy
glasses, and his eyes are squinty (maybe even a little shifty?) from
years spent staring at computer codes. While he's pondering some
mysterious bit of brilliance that may (or may not) be wafting
through his mind, he chomps on handfuls of Pringles, and for a
minute, he looks like a regular man, or better, a kid who's figuring
out some hard-to-crack videogame. In truth, Gary isn't very
charismatic, but that's part of the magic -- by his very like-themness,
he inspires groveling devotion from his emotionally screwed-up
minions.
No
surprise, Antitrust has a bone to pick with this billionaire.
Like other technophobic movies (The Net, Virtuosity,
and the insanely entertaining Lawnmower Man come to mind),
this one pits the bad corporate structure, embodied by Gary, against
independent thinking, embodied by Milo (Ryan Phillippe). Milo is
introduced as an idealistic computer whiz, just graduating and
looking for a way to bring his wondrous talents to the public
sector. At first, Milo has a utopian vision, which he shares with
his best friend and partner-on-school-projects, Teddy (Yee Jee Tso),
of creating a satellite-delivered global communications system, to
connect all communications devices with one content source, also
known as "digital convergence." Milo and Teddy have
visions of this system working for the public good -- you know, like
the "Eyes Only" streaming video in tv's Dark Angel,
where good guys valiantly expose corruption and bust criminals
during a daily feed to all televisions and radios, sort of Cops
without the racism or the nightsticks. But Gary has other ideas.
And... [insert tension-making music here] he's not about to let
anyone get in his way.
Gary
invites Milo for a weekend at the Campus, and after about 20 seconds
of thinking it over, the kid abandons his best friend and his
ideals, and moves to Portland, along with his girlfriend Alice
(Claire Forlani), where he's given a new SUV, a cozy home, and all
kinds of instructions about where he can and can't go on Campus. He
meets some geek-boys (one called Stinky, because you know, of
course, that computer freaks don't wash) and a geek-girl, Lisa
(Rachel Leigh Cook, again, as in She's All That, passing for
the anti-glamour girl). Once Milo starts working on this system,
which is rigged with an arbitrary, looming deadline, the film lapses
into total ridiculousness (I mean, total, on the level of The
Skulls). A tragedy befalls one of Milo's school buddies, and
almost immediately, Milo figures out that Gary's behind it.
Ordinarily, his figuring would seem too fast and too convenient, but
given that viewers have reached this realization long before,
the poor kid just looks dim-witted. Immediately following, the film
takes a few leaps and bounds of logic and suddenly Milo's caught up
in some surveillance antics straight out of a Bruce Willis movie, or
better yet, Mission Impossible -- the derivation is so
obvious that one of Milo's assailants asks him, in
mid-kick-to-the-head, "What's with all the MI3 bullsh*t?!
You're a geek!" Indeed he is, but now he's living out the
geek's dream, fully capable of running, jumping, and kicking ass
like Lara Croft.