SPOILERS: Jesse Armstrong's "Mountainhead" - What about Moral Issues?

OK - so now you’ve seen it. Tech Bro Lord of the Flies.

It did take me a while to realise we were watching the beginnings of a murder plot, but when the water went out and the outside world was starting to assert itself — when characters started holding knives and tossing bowling pins — I realised where we were heading.

What I adored is that we never really killed anyone — and, to wit, there were no heroes. Even Ramy’s Jeff, at the end of the day, is a money hungry cynical asshole.

What this film does best is taking the initiative, and training the viewer to realise that you don’t have to be smart to sound smart - and that any ideas, however stupid, can be presented as “intelligent” by the most asinine people.

Ultimately, as was to be expected, this film is a farce - a glossy, well-made farce — and a genuinely hilarious ride. Whether you’re left with hope or terror at the end of it is up to you. I don’t often like apocalypse/dystopian films, but this story didn’t feel that way. All I felt was an acknowledgement — this is where we are, and these are the dynamics at play — with a resolution and lesson that felt correct; we can’t bargain our way out of stupid.

In a way, the entire thing functions as a loose allegory for how western powers and Middle East leadership interact, this death-dance which sells everyone down the river, and risks the lives of the very leadership who dance it, naive, thinking they’re actually friends with the west.

At the Mountain Head, there is no such thing as brotherhood, and in the end, you live and die by the swords you choose to stoop to.