Antitrust (2001) - Not a Film Review

Antitrust. NOT a film review. I saw this film for the first time years ago when i was still a student in Computer Science. The only thing i remembered from that film was Rachael Leigh Cook. For a short time being, i was obsessed with her. But that's the only thing i remebered from the film.

When i saw the film again last night, it grows more relevant in accordance to my current knowledge shaped with my studies and experiences. As far as a computer-science related film that i've ever seen, this is as close as you could get on the geek level of our professional profile. Alas, after waking up until 3 am last night, i remembered why i hadn't remember anything from the film save for Rachael Leigh Cook. As a film, Antitrust was terrible. But, this post is meant as contemplating upon the pop culture that made a reference to our lines of work and not a film review.

The film was clearly built upon the facts and myths surrouding dot-com boom somewhere in the late 90's. We've heard - at least us, those who spent most of our time in a computer-related stuffs - too many stories about how people with a knack in Computer Science starting something in their own garage. Some made millions, but most were collapsed (thus, the term dot-com boom). I guess that even know, everyone on this field still had that dreams alive and tucked somewhere. Even now, some of my colleagues, friends i went to school with, were living the dreams, or started theirs. And i'm still waiting for my chance.

Gary Winston (Tim Robbins) had too many resemblance with Bill Gates to get ignored. He owns an enterprise, a software firm with an ambitious project. He recruited the brightest and most talented students to made sure his project didn't missed a deadline. Milo Hoffman (a terribly horrible Ryan Phillipe) was one of such talent. He and his partner-in-crime, Teddy Chan was offered by Gary to work in his project. With a persuasion from his girl-friend, he accepted the offer although he was shunned by his friend for being a sell-out. This is an interesting part of the film. Gary Winston (or i should say, Bill Gates, for the resemblance was uncanny) represents the all-powerful software megalomaniac. Smart, ambitious, successful, and socially inept which led to being too often, ruthless and reckless. On the other side of the river, we've got... um, us. At least, the distinctive us, whose determined by their achievement, their hacking skills, or their geek scale factor, or all of them. Anyway, these young bright individuals are portrayed as those myths around a BS in Computer Science during a dot-com boom. They set up a small networking gizmo in their garage, and start writing code, and eventually get noticed by the large enterprise software firm. These young 'uns in this film were further described as a supporter of an Open Source community thus making the resemblance between Gary Winston and Bill Gates more palpable that i was totally agreed with Roger Ebert when he said that he was surprised that Gary was spared from not wearing a name tag saying, 'Hi! I'm not Bill!' during the film.

Aside from that, however, despite that the film was so bad it's reeked, the film tried as close as it could gets to touch the world i've been living for the past nine years. I still couldn't bought the idea of a programmer glancing on a several lines of declaration variables code and said, "The compression is good", or that a programmer such as Milo could had an uber-hot girlfriend or that there's actually a female geek that looks like Rachael Leigh Cook. But, at the very least, it is more belieavable and lot more exciting than what Hugh Jackman did in Swordfish with all that nine (or six?) monitors and somekind of cube-thingies like visual programming which of course i haven't seen applied in the world as i knew it.

Oh, how i missed my school days.