Startup

OK, make no mistake, this movie was made to convey a message. If criticised in terms of, say, similarity to "the Firm", or "yet another cyber thriller", then you really missed the point. The message is pretty blunt, and guaranteed to anger a certain large corporation. (This is not an anti-corporate movie, it is anti- a ~particular~ corporation, and if you can't guess which one, maybe you should go back to exploring the Kalahari or whatever you've been doing for the last ten years.) This corporation has been known to spend extraordinary resources on PR (including, for example, bribing journalists and college professors), so almost certainly some of the comments on this message board will be produced by that corporation and should be read in that light.

Second, while murder is a bit over the top, pretty well all the other crimes committed by the large corporation in this movie are things of which the real corporation has been seriously accused, been found to be planning, or in some cases, convicted; yet in every case managing to escape with fines or compensation payments much smaller than the profits they made from the crime. That is why we hate them so much, and why this movie was made. It's also obvious why the motif of murder was added: some of the technical details of why their actions are pure evil are difficult for a non-techie to understand, so to make the movie accessible to a wider audience, they added a more blatant crime (plus pyrotechnic special effects, a tense chase scene, love interest, etc).

Thirdly, it is not a futuristic movie, it is present day; nothing in this movie is more than about 1 or 2 years in the future, at most, and most of it is happening now or happened several years ago.

Fourthly, technical realism: while some of the tech stuff is rubbish (hey, it's a movie!), the effort put into realism is dramatically good compared to information technology in any other movie I have ever seen. When we see IP's, they are actual IPs, but martian (I guess they don't want geeks going home and whois-ing them!), the code is all real code: some HTML, some C++, real scripting, but mostly VB (a language the certain large corporation is known to use a lot). The algorithms they discuss improving are even algorithms the product would really require! Not only that, the product is frighteningly similar to the large corporation's actual current development path!

So, if you walked away from this movie thinking "just for geeks" or "totally unrealistic", you need to give yourself a good hard slap, wake up and see what is really going on in the world around you. This movie was about as unrealistic and irrelevant as "All the President's Men".

Oh, by the way, I better say that all the above comments are only my personal opinions, in case they try to sue me, because they do do stuff like that.

I praise Hollywood for creating a movie that does not have mass appeal. Too often movies of this type are designed to be for too wide an audience and all credibility is lost. This film avoids this, for the most part, by primarily appealing to a core target audience in the 15 to 35 age range.

The credits sequence began and I immediately cringed and thought, "Hacker 2...ugh." but it didn't turn out that way, much to my pleasure. Horrible computer idiocy was kept to a minimum, and generally only used for dramatic effect rather than the "computerz r kewl" aspect.

The dramatic performances were very good in my opinion and the film was superb in creating suspense. The soundtrack is rather excellent as well.

By my guess, huge changes were made to this film (based on the trailer) and I look forward to seeing an alternate version or cut-scenes on the DVD.

I definitely recommend this movie for anyone who likes technology and computers. For everyone else, I don't know if you would like it, honestly, but I can tell you it's not a whole movie about computers.

This movie was obviously written by a graphic designer (much like myself) or someone in a similar position who has a vast understanding of programming jargon and corporate culture, but doesn't actually understand what is being said or the politics behind it all. This will appeal to people who don't work in this environment, but to people who do... well. They're just going to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the title credits.

I really enjoyed this film--it was exciting as well as thought-provoking. If you enjoyed "The Net" and "The Firm" you'll probably enjoy a hybrid of the two, although I found "Antitrust" to be more satisfying than either of those. Tim Robbins as always was terrific as the "Bill Gates" character and Ryan Phillippe was excellent as his genius protege. "Antitrust" was a great, entertaining way to spend an afternoon at the movies.

This movie is interesting on a surface level. It has lots of action and suspense to engage even passive viewers. Antitrust contains lots of ideas that are specific to the software industry however. The most significant theme of this movie is not one that seeks to implicate major corporations in illegal activities; it is instead one that blatantly discusses the idea of open source code sharing. For those of you who do not know what this is, it is the free sharing of computer programing code. This movie is designed to entertain though. It makes corporate software companies look like organized crime rings. This is simply Hollywood's appeal to its audiences.This is a good movie for all audiences; however a Linux user would particularly enjoy it.