Antitrust

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.

Its hard to write about this film. Lets do good, bad, & ugly... The Good is Ryan is the star. As Milo, he's a well educated student going to work for this extremly secure company. The dream job for all the knock-off Computer Programmers that never did anything with their certificate! Nice car, nice home, beautiful girl... The Bad, the story of this film gets very interesting when something tramatic happens in Milo's life. But, the closer you get into the movie, the more you stop trusting each person that is around Milo, when your just right there in a place that very few motion pictures take you, you get to the ending sequence...& that ladies & gentlemen is where The Ugly is. (6) Z.

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.

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 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.