bBetween the slash-and-burn reboot of the US government led by dank meme fans and the relentless push for AI by venture capital-backed blowhards, 2025 feels like the ultimate obnoxious tech bro. Appropriately, the jargon-promoting, self-respecting digital visionary also this year became Hollywood’s favorite villain in everything from blockbusters to slapstick spoofs. Think overworked props departments mocking up a fake Forbes magazine cover featuring another smiling white guy being called the “Master of the Metaverse” or whatever.
With such market saturation, the risk is that all these confused people will get mixed up in a slick swamp. It seemed reasonable to expect that Stanley Tucci might sprinkle a little prosciutto on The Electric State, Netflix’s no-expense-spared alt-history robot fantasia. As Ethan Skeet – the creator of the “Neurocaster” technology that quelled an AI rebellion and then addicted the general public to nostalgic virtual-reality – Tucci certainly looked the part: bald and dapper in the wardrobe of a retro Bond villain. But even the great cocktail-makers couldn’t come up with anything more than sour existential proclamations, like: “Our world is a tire fire floating on an ocean of pee.”
There was more baldness in Superman, where Nicholas Hoult’s Lex Luthor embodied the worst kind of norm-changer: desperate to get on a talk show. Angered that the world is ignoring his talents in favor of a flying alien, the founder of LuthorCorp spends a lot of money manipulating social media, deploying an army of vivisectioned monkey cyborgs to flood the platforms with anti-Superman hashtags and memes. That the film faced outrage regarding its perceived awareness gave the hall-of-mirrors a disappointing feel to what was essentially an overpriced crowd-pleaser. Hoult’s Lex was also a distractingly hot tech CEO, which pushed the film further into the realms of fantasy.
Is it more attractive when these self-respecting douchebags are funny? In the avant-garde world of killer doll action thriller M3gan 2.0, Jemaine Clement was supremely confident as Elton Appleton, a high-functioning billionaire whose latest wheeze is pushing an unwanted nerve implant on the masses. Under the influence of an emotionless fembot killer, Elton is left humiliated in his final moments, his signature Ultrawave technology easily hacked, his strange artificial six-pack exposed. It was pitiful but humane. As the movie progressed, you really started to miss him.
If Clement took the Technical Brother unnoticed, Danny Huston had to remain passive opposite Liam Neeson’s blasphemous Frank Drebin Jr. in The Naked Gun reboot. Houston’s Richard Kane was a hybrid Jeff Bezos/Elon Musk-esque blowhard who used galactic profits from his online retail and electric car empires to create a primordial Law of Toughness device. Their master plan was to push the masses back into a prehistoric mindset, violently exterminate the herd, and usher in a new era for mankind (or at least its billionaire class). Ken was obsessed with men’s sperm counts, building luxury bunkers for the ultra-rich and Black Eyed Peas. In other words: really mental.
In the dirty, dirty world of The Toxic Avenger reboot, Kevin Bacon’s floppy-haired biotech baddie Bob Garbinger stood out only because he looked so pale and pampered. While it’s never a good sign when a self-proclaimed “healthstyle” guru gets a mix of Sisyphus and syphilis, Garbinger’s habit of going shirtless while flogging a “proprietary cutting-edge bio-booster” in TV commercials felt like a timely skewering of immortality-seeking biohackers like Brian Johnson.
In 2022, Evan Peters played the lead role in Netflix’s Scary Monsters: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story. Did this influence his casting as the second generation Nepo Baby in Tron: Ares? To be fair, his Julian Dillinger – the grandson of David Warner’s boardroom scoundrel from the original 1982 Tron – seemed more neurotic than psychotic: a baby-faced technopredator with wonky circuit board sleeve tattoos, whose audacious forays into 3D-printing rogue neon war machines and digital commandos were only slightly disappointed by the fact that they imploded within 30 minutes. A wildly expensive, resource-intensive, essentially useless product? Intentionally or not, it felt like an apt metaphor for the AI bubble.
But why stop at just one douchey technique, brother? Jesse Armstrong’s toothy satire Mountainhead takes the bold step of making every single character see the worst of the “move faster, break stuff” billionaire mentality, isolating them — and the audience — in a remote, ostensibly deluxe ski lodge while the specter of potential Armageddon encroaches. As the Musk-like owner of a social media app that spreads dangerous AI-enhanced misinformation, Cory Michael Smith captures the whiny, morality-agnostic tone of someone richer than God who sees the world as his toy.
With Venice (Smith), silverback investor Randall (Steve Carell), canny algorithm tamer Jeff (Ramy Youssef) and future wellness app supremo Soper (Jason Schwartzman) constantly needing each other, the combative quartet has the illicit thrill of bragging, toasting and roasting inside-baseball repartee. But as the world spiraled towards anarchy, it was disappointing to see these four nominal thought leaders clumsily workshopping how to make the best of the situation, and not just because it seemed so plausible. We have all been forced to absorb the distortions of our technological overlords because of their disproportionate influence in the real world. As the new cinema year approaches, is it too much to ask if we don’t want to see it continue in the movies too?
