Defy me!
There's something suspicious about a movie that might
uses slogans as dialogue. This one lays out its
competing democratic and capitalistic ideals by such
shorthand. For example: "Never underestimate radical
vision," the motto of NURV, the Microsoft-like
corporation at the center of Antitrust, headed by
the Bill Gates-like Gary Winston (Tim Robbins). When
Gary points to the motto on a drawing board during a
meeting with his worker bees on the NURV Campus, their
eyes light up. When he tells them that the computer
business is "binary -- you're a one or a zero, alive
or dead!", they sit up a little straighter in their
seats and nod their heads in understanding. And when
he exhorts them to "Surprise me, challenge me, defy
me! Defy yourselves!", they applaud. A few even jump
to their feet as if in a fit of admiration. Amen and
hallelujah! This guy is a god!
Yeah, right. Unless you haven't been getting out much
lately, you probably know that the most common movie
villains these days -- aside from the usual standby
Nazis -- are lawyers and computer executives,
especially those who are obscenely wealthy. Robbins
adopts an appropriately Anti-Christ-like posture in
Antitrust. He's soft-faced and slightly rumpled,
wearing khakis and geek-boy glasses, and his eyes are
squinty (maybe even a little shifty?) from years spent
staring at computer codes. While he's pondering some
mysterious bit of brilliance that may (or may not) be
wafting through his mind, he chomps on handfuls of
Pringles, and for a minute, he looks like a regular
man, or better, a kid who's figuring out some
hard-to-crack videogame. In truth, Gary isn't very
charismatic, but that's part of the magic -- by his
very like-themness, he inspires groveling devotion
from his emotionally screwed-up minions.
No surprise, Antitrust has a bone to pick with this billionaire. Like other technophobic movies (The Net, Virtuosity, and the insanely entertaining Lawnmower Man come to mind), this one pits the bad corporate structure, embodied by Gary, against independent thinking, embodied by Milo (Ryan Phillippe). Milo is introduced as an idealistic
computer whiz, just graduating and looking for a way
to bring his wondrous talents to the public sector. At
first, Milo has a utopian vision, which he shares with
his best friend and partner-on-school-projects, Teddy
(Yee Jee Tso), of creating a satellite-delivered
global communications system, to connect all
communications devices with one content source, also
known as "digital convergence." Milo and Teddy have
visions of this system working for the public good --
you know, like the "Eyes Only" streaming video in TV's
Dark Angel, where good guys valiantly expose
corruption and bust criminals during a daily feed to
all televisions and radios, sort of Cops without the
racism or the nightsticks. But Gary has other ideas.
And... [insert tension-making music here] he's not
about to let anyone get in his way.
Gary invites Milo for a weekend at the Campus, and
after about 20 seconds of thinking it over, the kid
abandons his best friend and his ideals, and moves to
Portland, along with his girlfriend Alice (Claire
Forlani), where he's given a new SUV, a cozy home, and
all kinds of instructions about where he can and can't
go on Campus. He meets some geek-boys (one called
Stinky, because you know, of course, that computer
freaks don't wash) and a geek-girl, Lisa (Rachel Leigh
Cook, again, as in She's All That, passing for the
anti-glamour girl). Once Milo starts working on this
system, which is rigged with an arbitrary, looming
deadline, the film lapses into total ridiculousness (I
mean, total, on the level of The Skulls). A tragedy
befalls one of Milo's school buddies, and almost
immediately, Milo figures out that Gary's behind it.
Ordinarily, his figuring would seem too fast and too
convenient, but given that viewers have reached this
realization long before, the poor kid just looks
dim-witted. Immediately following, the film takes a
few leaps and bounds of logic and suddenly Milo's
caught up in some surveillance antics straight out of
a Bruce Willis movie, or better yet, Mission Impossible -- the derivation is so obvious that one
of Milo's assailants asks him, in
mid-kick-to-the-head, "What's with all the MI3
bullshit?! You're a geek!" Indeed he is, but now he's
living out the geek's dream, fully capable of running,
jumping, and kicking ass like Lara Croft.
No matter that all of the above makes little sense.
Halfway through Antitrust, you're more than likely
to have given up on that angle, and will be watching
just to see what other lunatic elements pop up (and
there are plenty, including Milo's fatal allergy to a
certain foodstuff, Alice's tragic backstory, and
Gary's snide jokes about Bill Gates). Amid the chaos,
Antitrust makes two rudimentary arguments. The most
obvious is also the most hypocritical and least
surprising: corporations are bad. Or at least, the
ones with monomaniacal heads are bad. I suppose that
the corporations that produce tripe like Antitrust
let themselves off the moral hook, or frankly don't
care what you think of them. The other argument is
less convincingly made, but it's the one that you
might presume provided a nominal reason, aside from
cash, for Robbins and Phillippe (both performers with
well-known and committed liberal politics) to sign on
for this feeble project. This is the argument voiced
as a motto by Milo, which he says has been handed down
to him by a wise elder: "Human knowledge belongs to
the world." And there you have it, straight from MGM:
Napster is a good thing.
