Fall film slate casts Silicon Valley leaders as villains

Four films releasing this fall depict prominent Silicon Valley figures as antagonists, a shift that signals Hollywood's portrayal of tech leaders is turning darker. The projects feature Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, and Elizabeth Holmes, moving away from earlier narratives that celebrated founders as brilliant innovators. Instead, these new stories cast them as controversial figures whose ambitions may cause more harm than good.

Aaron Sorkin's "The Social Reckoning," a follow-up to his 2010 film "The Social Network," opened with Jeremy Strong portraying Mark Zuckerberg during the 2021 Facebook whistleblower leak. Sorkin takes cinematic liberties with chronology and other details in this depiction of a more sinister Zuckerberg. In the documentary sphere, Alex Gibney's four-hour film "Musk" details Elon Musk's rise and includes a 10-minute intermission. The film played at the Venice Film Festival, where it received critical acclaim, before facing legal threats from Musk's team. It is currently showing in select theaters and opens nationwide on Friday.

A24 is releasing "You Can See Everything," an experimental documentary by Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim that follows former Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes in the weeks before her imprisonment. The studio describes the film as an intimate portrait of an enigmatic felon that becomes a mind-bending three-year journey into the abyss. In the drama category, "Artificial," directed by Luca Guadagnino, stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman and hits theaters on Christmas Day. According to The Verge, Garfield depicts Altman as a manipulative, power-hungry psychopath who lies easily and uses anyone to get what he wants. NEON, the studio behind the film, calls it the story of OpenAI and a two-decade artificial intelligence arms race, framing it as a battle over who should control technology that could change the fate of humanity.

This lineup marks a sharp departure from earlier works like "Jobs" and "Something Ventured," which focused on the ingenuity of founders and venture capitalists. Margaret O'Mara, a University of Washington historian who studies Silicon Valley, notes that the public's understanding of the industry has changed drastically. She describes the previous relationship between tech and culture as an ardent love affair that has now ended quickly. J.M. Tyree, writer and editor-in-chief of Film Quarterly, says these movies hold up a mirror to current social anxieties, specifically regarding power consolidating in the hands of the few at the expense of the many.

Tyree argues that tech founders make compelling on-screen villains because they combine two archetypes: the ruthless businessman corrupted by greed, similar to characters in "Citizen Kane" or "The Wolf of Wall Street," and the morally ambiguous mad scientist who recklessly employs technology, like in "Metropolis" or "Frankenstein." Their eccentricities also provide good entertainment value. Polls indicate that Americans are souring on AI and believe it is moving too fast, while Pew Research Center polling shows two in three Americans say social media has been bad for democracy. O'Mara concludes that extreme wealth makes people weird, a trait that serves well for these dramatic portrayals.