Mountainhead trailer: Jesse Armstrong to take on tech billionaires in HBO movie

Trust Jesse Armstrong to make an Ayn Rand joke in the name of his new movie.

Having created Succession and written for Veep and The Thick of It, Armstrong’s razor-sharp wit is best deployed against the foibles and delusions of the rich and powerful.

For his anticipated HBO film, calling it Mountainhead is all too delicious.

The movie dropped its first trailer today, finally revealing details of what to expect beyond the one-line summary that previously gave away so little.

We knew the film would star Steve Carell, Jason Schwartzman, Cory Michael Smith and Ramy Youssef as four wealthy friends who meet up during a global crisis.

Now we know they’re not just rich, they’re tech billionaires, a special breed of people that in today’s cultural milieu, invites a certain level of suspicion and contempt.

Silicon Valley types also happen to love Rand and her grand, anti-communist tome, The Fountainhead. For individuals chaffing against any form of government regulation that might get in the way of their “vision” and “creation”, Rand’s libertarianism is a bulwark against external intervention.

The movie also happens to be set at a ski lodge on a mountain, so, you know, the Mountainhead. Clever.

Definitely more so than when one of the characters smugly declare themselves as “four presidents of tech, here on Mount Techmore”. You just know these guys are going to be insufferable, but that’s the point, right?

The gist of it seems to be the four are gathered for funtimes of snow games, poker, riffing on each other and a six-man, line-caught turbot. That’s some fancy fish.

At some point during the getaway, seemingly owned by Schwartzman’s character, the world starts to fall apart. News reports and dialogue refer to panic buying, sectarian violence and nations on the brink of collapse, both politically and economically.

Which, of course, leads Carell’s character to note, “This is a serious moment, I think that’s why I’m so excited about these atrocities. I’m thinking about all of the people who are not killing each other.

Coming off the boom of Succession, Armstrong was able to write his own ticket, so you have to believe he has some points to make about the effect of tech companies, and the God-complex individuals who run them, on the social, political and economic fabric of our world.

In the trailer, Youssef’s character calls Smith’s the richest man in the world but decries his platform as “racist and sh-tty” that is “inflaming a volatile situation, circulating unfalsifiable deep fakes, massive fraud, market instability”.

Sounds familiar.

Mountainhead is streaming on Max on June 1.