Review of Antitrust (2001) by Maggie M — 12 May 2009

"This isn't a game! In the real world, when you kill people they die - for real! And in the real world you're fucked!" - Milo Hoffman.

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 corporation has been known to spend extraordinary resources on PR, so almost certainly some of the comments on this message board will be produced by that corporation and should be read in that light. 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. 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. Antitrust 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. Technical realism: while some of the technology stuff is rubbish, the effort put into realism is dramatically good compared to information technology in any other movie I have ever seen. 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. This movie was about as unrealistic and irrelevant as All the President's Men.