A Film Canon

Antitrust translates the heist film, and its fascination with eluding surveillance, into the realm of hactivism, diversifying a narrative that could take place, in its entirety, in front of a computer screen, or network of screens (the climax involves little more than waiting for a good internet signal). To this end, Peter Howitt presents IT prodigy Milo Hoffman's (Ryan Phillippe) decision to pursue corporate over garage entrepreneurship - specifically, the dubious NURV corporation, headed by IT mogul Gary Winston (Tim Robbins) - as a choice between cinematic and computer architecture. On the one hand, Milo's garage is presented as trustworthy, physical, analog - the only space in the film in which film doesn't feel outdated. On the other hand, NURV is presented as untrustworthy, immanent, digital - and Howitt uses computer generated imagery for a great deal of Winston's extraordinary house and headquarters, a decision that actually adds to the film's realism. For all that this breaks down the boundaries between wall and firewall, Rear Window and Rear Windows, Winston's aestheticism is ultimately more indebted to Steve Jobs than Bill Gates, his cuteness condensed to a darkened space consisting of little more than a ladder, a couple of economically placed wires, and a series of artfully/accidentally placed light fixtures, as if to ground iAesthetics in the minimalist sculpture and installation art of the late 70s. As a result, the film's conflict between open and closed source codes plays less as an issue of intellectual property than of aesthetic freedom - and, specifically, the aesthetic bind of iAesthetics themselves, which are about constricting as much as encouraging style. Nevertheless, if the specifics of IT are marginalised narratively - at times the enjoyably bombastic score makes it feel more like a dialectic between garage and stadium rock - they are still very much present stylistically, as evinced in an alternation between frenetic, skidding action and almost intolerable stasis. This ensures that character and narrative development take place at the stop-start pace of code loading, and translates code itself into the basis for an eccentric action aesthetic, more concerned with routing than running, configuration than confrontation. Similarly, after a certain point, the narrative twists tend to be pared down to appearances of numbers, letters and symbols, pixel resolution as narrative revelation - it's one of the very few films that benefits from the occasional DVD skip or freeze - and it's this rigorous and repetitive encoding that occasionally raises the film to a kind of sublime IT melodrama. This sense of wasted energy, a disparity between the film's net and gross output, nicely complements the curious revelation that, in the digital age, performing a heist doesn't merely involve infilitrating a structure, but building a structure simply to infiltrate it - and it's this peculiarly digital confusion between collaboration and competition, as well as between technological and aesthetic property, that blurs the basis for antitrust law even as the film so earnestly and ham-fistedly insists upon it. The result is a curious, charming cognitive dissonance that perhaps explains the critical denigration of the film's "stupidity", although it's really less a result of the film itself than its schizophrenic techno-economy, poised midway between Sneakers and The Social Network.