NEW YORK (AP) ā āA toast to the disruptors,ā Edward Nortonās tech billionaire says in
And why not a toast? wonāt give a prize for best villain, but if they did, Miles Bron would win it in a walk. (With apologies to the cloud of āNope.ā) He is an immediately recognizable type we've grown well acquainted with: a visionary (or so everyone says), a social media narcissist, a self-styled disrupter who talks a lot about ābreaking stuff.ā
Miles Bron is just the latest in a long line of Hollywoodās favorite villain: the tech bro. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the movie industry has found perhaps its richest resource of big-screen antagonists since Soviet-era Russia.
Great movie villains donāt come along often. The best-picture nominated like its predecessor, was content to battle with a faceless enemy of unspecified nationality. Why antagonize international ticket buyers when Tom Cruise vs. Whomever works just fine?
But in recent years, the tech bro has proliferated on movie screens as Hollywoodās go-to bad guy. Itās a rise that has mirrored mounting fears over technologyās expanding reach into our lives and increasing skepticism for the not always altruistic motives of the men ā and it is mostly men ā who control todayās digital empires.
Weāve had the devious Biosyn Genetics CEO (Campbell Scott) in āJurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the peril of tech overreach; Chris Hemsworthās biotech overlord in āSpiderheadā; and Mark Rylanceās maybe-Earth-destroying tech guru in 2021's āDonāt Look Up.ā We've had Jesse Eisenberg, who indelibly played Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010's āThe Social Network,ā as a tech bro-styled Lex Luthor in 2016's āBatman v. Superman"; Harry Mellingās pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020ās āThe Old Guard"; Taika Waititi's rule-breaking videogame mogul in 2021's āFree Guy"; Oscar Isaac's search engine CEO in 2014's āEx Machinaā; and the critical portrait of the Apple co-founder in 2015's āSteve Jobs.ā
Kids movies, too, regularly channel parental anxieties about technology's impact on children. In 2021's āThe Mitchells vs. the Machines,ā a newly launched AI brings about a robot apocalypse. āRon's Gone Wrong" (2021) also used a robot metaphor for smartphone addiction. And TV series have just as aggressively rushed to dramatize Big Tech blunders. Recent entries include: Uber's Travis Kalanick in Showtime's āSuper Pumpedā; Theranos' Elizabeth Holmes in Hulu's āThe Dropoutā; and WeWork's Adam and Rebekah Neumann in Apple TV's āWe Crashed.ā
Some of these portrayals you could chalk up to Hollywood jealousy over the emergence of another California epicenter of innovation. But those worlds merged long ago. Many of the companies that released these movies are disrupters, themselves ā none more than Netflix, distributor of āGlass Onion." The streamer was cajoled into releasing Johnson's sequel . Estimates suggested the film collected some $15 million over opening weekend, the old fashioned way, but Netflix executives have said they don't plan to make a habit of such theatrical rollouts.
And the distrust goes deeper than any Hollywood-Silicon Valley rivalry. found that 70% of Americans think social media companies do more harm than good. Tech leaders like Meta chief Zuckerberg .
As characters, tech bros ā hoodie-wearing descendants of the mad scientist ā have formed an archetype: Masters of the universe whose hubris leads to catastrophe, social media savants who can't manage their personal relationships. Whether their visions of the future pan out or not, we end up living in their world, either way. They're villains who see themselves as heroes.
āIn my mind, heās really the most dangerous human being around,ā Rylance says of his Peter Isherwell. āHe believes that we can dominate our way out of any problem that nature hands us. I think thatās the same kind of thinking thatās got us into the problem weāre in now, trying to dominate each other and dominate all the life weāre intimately connected to and dependent on.ā
āGlass Onion,ā nominated for best adapted screenplay, presents a new escalation in tech mogul mockery. Nortonās eminently punchable CEO, with a name so nearly āBro,ā is enormously rich, powerful and, considering that heās working on a volatile new energy source, dangerous. But Bron is also, as Daniel Craigās Benoit Blanc eventually deduces, an idiot. āA vainglorious buffoon,ā Blanc says.
In Johnsonās film, the tech bro/emperor bro truly has no clothes. Heās just skating by with lies, deceit and a bunch of not-real words like āpredefiniteā and āinbreathiate.ā
Even though Johnson wrote āGlass Onionā well before , the movieās release seemed almost preternaturally timed to coincide with it. The Tesla and SpaceX chief executive was only one of Johnsonās real-world inspirations, though some took Bron as a direct Musk parody. In a widely read Twitter thread, conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Johnson was dramatizing Musk as āa bad and stupid man,ā which he called āan incredibly stupid theory, since Musk is one of the most successful entrepreneurs in human history." He added: āHow many rockets has Johnson launched lately?ā
Musk himself hasnāt publicly commented on āGlass Onion,ā but he has previously had numerous gripes with Hollywood, including its depictions of guys like him. āHollywood refuses to write even one story about an actual company startup where the CEO isnāt a dweeb and/or evil,ā Musk tweeted last year.
Musk will soon enough get his own movie. The Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney on Monday announced he was several months into work on āMusk,ā which producers promise will offer a ādefinitive and unvarnished examinationā of the tech entrepreneur.
At the same time as the tech broās supervillainy supremacy has emerged, some movies have sought not to lampoon Big Tech but to imbibe some of the digital world's infinite expanse. Phil Lord, who with Christopher Miller has produced āThe Mitchells vs the Machinesā and the multiverse-splitting āSpider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,ā says the internet has profoundly influenced their approach to film.
āWe, legacy media, are responding in maybe subconscious ways to new media,ā says Lord. āWeāre all just trying to figure out how to live in the new world. Itās changing peopleās behavior. It changes the way we find and experience love. It changes the way we live. Of course, the stories we tell and how we tell them are going to change as well and reflect that. āInto the Spider-Verseā certainly reflects having a lot of content from every era in your brain all at the same time.ā
too, is reflective of our multi-screen, media-bombarded lives. Writer-directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, whose film is up for say they wanted to channel the confusion and heartache of living in the everything-everywhere existence that tech moguls like Miles Bron helped create.
āThe reason why we made the movie is because thatās what modern life feels like,ā says Kwan.
So even though Miles Bron won't go home with an Academy Award on Sunday, he still wins, in a way. It's his world. We're all just living in it.
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Jake Coyle, The Associated Press
