Anti-trust narrates the story of two brilliant programmers whose lives become very complicated when a major software corporation gets involved in their work.
Ryan Phillipe plays one of the two programmers and Tim Robbins plays the CEO of the mega corporation.
The allusions to Microsoft is not lost on the audience, especially when Tim Robbins is made to look so much like William Gates III, complete with the magical mansion, the sweater and the Pringles. Also the corporation’s ’’campus’’ also looks very much like Micro$oft’s campus in Redmond.
Coming to the movie, it glorifies geekdom. Milo Hoffman (Phillipe) is a good-looking uber-geek (a rarity) who is sought after by Gary Winston(Robbins), head of a corporation called NURV (Never Underestimate Radical Vision). He’s about to release a ground-breaking communication system called Synapse, which will give him ’’world-domination’’ and add to his already over-flowing coffers.
But his own programmers are too incompetent to help him complete the development of the product (the movie again takes a shot at the quality of Microsoft personnel) so he hires Milo to help him out.
Milo’s friend who happens to be of Chinese ethnicity is killed by Winston’s goons who makes it look like a race-motivated killing. Milo is intrigued and realizes that Winston would stop at nothing to achieve his goals and starts to investigate the practices of the company, in the hope of finding concrete proof for shutting down the company with the aid of the Justice department.
The movie could have been shortened because in some places it seems to lose direction. Also the plot is sometimes too incredibly simple when they could have made it more complicated with the aid of a more skilful screenplay.
I would recommend this movie if 1. you want to spend sometime and are too discerning to spend it on a Steven Seagal movie 2. If you are a foam-at-the-mouth Linux advocate and want to enjoy the prospect of Bill Gates actually being shut down by the Justice Department.
(BTW , this review was written with Open Office, using a Netscape browser, running Red Hat Linux 9.0)