Antitrust reaction paper

They might have been able to make a nice little thriller out of "Antitrust" if they'd kept one eye on the
Goofy Meter. Just when the movie is cooking, the needle tilts over into Too Goofy, which breaks the
spell. What are we to make of a brainy nerd hero who fears his girlfriend is trying to kill him by adding
sesame seeds to the Chinese food, and administers a quick allergy test at a romantic dinner by
scratching himself with a fork and rubbing on some of the brown sauce? Too goofy.

The movie uses a thinly disguised fictional version of Bill Gates as his hero--so thinly, I'm surprised they
didn't protect against libel by having the villain wear a name tag saying, "Hi! I'm not Bill!" This billionaire
software mogul, named Gary Winston, is played by Tim Robbins as a man of charm, power and paranoia.
"Anybody working in a garage can put us out of business," he frets, and he's right. Cut to a garage
occupied by Milo Hoffman (Ryan Phillippe) and his best buddy Teddy Chin (Yee Jee Tso), who are on the
edge of a revolutionary communications breakthrough.

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Winston's company, which seems a whole lot like Microsoft, is working toward the same goal. In fact,
Winston claims his new Synapse global communications system will, and I quote, "link every
communications device on the planet." Too goofy. In order to discourage his competitors, Winston has
announced a release date for his new software while it is still being written (details like this are why the
company seems a whole lot like Microsoft).

He needs a software breakthrough, and he thinks Milo and Teddy can provide it. He invites them up for
a tour of his company's campus in the Pacific Northwest. Teddy declines: He hates the megacorp and
believes code should be freely distributed. Milo accepts, and before he leaves, is visited by an agent
from the (pre-Bush) Justice Department (Richard Roundtree), who is preparing an antitrust case against
Winston. "If you see something up there that hits you the wrong way, do the right thing," the agent
says, offering Milo--who stands on the brink of untold millions--a salary much higher than you can earn
at McDonald's.

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Milo takes the junket to the software campus and is shown around by cool young software dudes and a
sexy software babe named Lisa (Rachael Leigh Cook), whose vibe suggests she likes him. Then he gets a
tour of Winston's palatial high-tech lakeside home, which even includes computers that sense when
you're in a room and play your favorite music while displaying your favorite art on the digital wall
screens. "Bill Gates has a system like this," says Milo, just as we were thinking the exact same words.
"Bill who?" says Winston. "His is primitive." Milo decides to go to work for the megacorp, and is flattered
by all the personal attention he gets from Winston, a friendly charmer who has a habit of dropping
around even in the middle of the night. At one point when Milo is stuck, Winston hands him a disc with
some code on it that "might help," just as a TV set in the background is reporting a news story about the
death of a gifted software programmer.