Antitrust

This movie is very, very loosely based on Mickeysoft.  A giant software company hires the youngest, best and brightest.  They throw money, cheap car loans, cheap house mortgages, etc. at them.  A great campus to work at.

The movie starts out with a very hectic pace.  The friends celebrate solving some vague programming problem, lotsa high fives, etc.  The main character gets the offer from The Big Company about the time that their little company gets venture capital to move out of their garage.  A few quick sentences illustrate their relationships, and the main character with his girlfriend.  They run through a rapid introduction of the campus and some of the kid's fellow workers.  There's a press conference where the head of The Big Company announces the next Big Thing, tying all computers together from mainframes to cell phones.  IOW, silly hype not too far from what real companies sometimes promise.

And then the pace slows dramatically.  There are blips where there's a lot happening, but after the frantic beginning it felt flat.

This is where the main character slowly learns that the company is using nefarious techniques to beat small new companies.  First bugging and later he suspects them of murdering his friend.  As the mystery deepens, we learn that The Big Company is similar to The Firm, where they've bugged his house, watch him constantly, etc.  And to me it seemed it should have been impossible to know who to trust.  But he ends up picking one and turning a couple of others and of course they're all the right choices.

Then it becomes a movie about the bright kid using The Big Company's technology against itself.  I guess it's supposed to be irony.  There are a couple of cheesy plot devices.  Like where the kid and the head of The Big Company race to type in IP addresses.  And of course, they put in one "suspenseful" moment where the kid is trying to copy a big chunk of data to a disk as one of the bad guys is coming into the room.

I did like how The Big Company hid stuff in plain sight, along with an obvious diversion.

It was a bit contrived and had a bad lull in the middle.  Overall, an okay suspense thriller.  On my brother's Total Movie Value Scale, Rental with Dinner.

Back to movies

Please email comments, typos, errors, dead links, and any suggestions to webmaster@mightydrake.com. (Privacy statement)
Copyright © 1997-2007 Mighty Drake, Inc. All rights reserved.
Last modified: June 14, 2004

Best viewed with:	Hosted by:	Composed with:	In association  with:	Fight Spam
Opera or Mozilla or Explorer or Netscape	Site 5	FrontPage	Amazon.com	Spamcop.net &  Popfile & Greylisting