Conspiración en la red (Antitrust)

When I first saw the preview for Anti-Trust, I thought 2 things. 1) It was a not-so-disguised movie about Microsoft. 2) It was probably "The Net 2." It looked like another computer-based movie that would be as realistic as "Hackers," but with a more obvious plot. From the first 30 seconds of the preview you can pretty much tell that the open-source sidekick is marked for death and Bill Gates...I mean Gary Winston was a criminal mastermind who will do anything to get ahead in business. I'd happy to say that while the first half of the movie went without any surprises, there are enough plot twists in the 2nd half to keep you guessing who's on who's side. Tim Robbins and Ryan Philippe both give good performances, and nobody seems out of place talking about technology. It's not the best movie I've seen this year, but it definately blew away my expectations.

I saw this movie not expecting much. While I'm not disappointed in the movie, I felt that more could have been explored in the themes of the movie. Where is the line between self-interest and greed? What creates innovation? What stifles it? What are the consequences of uncontrolled self-interest?

I also found problems with some of the little details (having known lots of computer people, I get picky). For example, all of the code shown is simple html; wouldn't they have used other computer languages? Also, I know the Vancouver area quite well (where Antitrust was filmed) and sometimes, it got too obvious. (See below)

Additionally, some of the other characters' backgrounds could have been developed further.

Yet, the sets were impressive! The interiors did convey the appropriate atmosphere. The use of the Chan Centre at the University of British Columbia- good choice! However, the NURV campus was much too obviously the Burnaby campus of Simon Fraser University. (The aerial shots gave it away).

Still, it was a decent movie, all things considered.

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 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 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.