NEW YORK (AP) — “A toast to the disruptors,” Edward Norton’s tech billionaire says in Rian Johnson’s Oscar-nominated “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery.”
And why not a toast? Sunday’s Academy Awards won’t give a prize for best villain, but if they did, Miles Bron would win it in a walk. (With apologies to the cloud of “Nope.”) He is an immediately recognizable type we’ve grown well acquainted with: a visionary (or so everyone says), a social media narcissist, a self-styled disrupter who talks a lot about “breaking stuff.”
Miles Bron is just the latest in a long line of Hollywood’s favorite villain: the tech bro. Looking north to Silicon Valley, the movie industry has found perhaps its richest resource of big-screen antagonists since Soviet-era Russia.
Great movie villains don’t come along often. The best-picture nominated “Top Gun: Maverick,” like its predecessor, was content to battle with a faceless enemy of unspecified nationality. Why antagonize international ticket buyers when Tom Cruise vs. Whomever works just fine?
But in recent years, the tech bro has proliferated on movie screens as Hollywood’s go-to bad guy. It’s a rise that has mirrored mounting fears over technology’s expanding reach into our lives and increasing skepticism for the not always altruistic motives of the men – and it is mostly men – who control today’s digital empires.
We’ve had the devious Biosyn Genetics CEO (Campbell Scott) in “Jurassic World: Dominion, a franchise dedicated to the peril of tech overreach; Chris Hemsworth’s biotech overlord in “Spiderhead”; and Mark Rylance’s maybe-Earth-destroying tech guru in 2021′s “Don’t Look Up.” We’ve had Jesse Eisenberg, who indelibly played Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in 2010′s “The Social Network,” as a tech bro-styled Lex Luthor in 2016′s “Batman v. Superman”; Harry Melling’s pharmaceutical entrepreneur in 2020’s “The Old Guard”; Taika Waititi’s rule-breaking videogame mogul in 2021′s “Free Guy”; Oscar Isaac’s search engine CEO in 2014′s “Ex Machina”; and the critical portrait of the Apple co-founder in 2015′s “Steve Jobs.”
Kids movies, too, regularly channel parental anxieties about technology’s impact on children. In 2021′s “The Mitchells vs. the Machines,” a newly launched AI brings about a robot apocalypse. “Ron’s Gone Wrong” (2021) also used a robot metaphor for smartphone addiction. And TV…