YMMV / Antitrust

• Complete Monster: Gary Winston is the owner and founder of NURV, masquerading as a charitable philanthropist to cover up the dark secrets of his company. Keeping NURV ahead of the competition by stealing code and intellectual property from others, Gary's true evil comes from the fact that he has dozens of promising minds on a watchlist, and murders any single one of them if their intelligence reaches the point of being a threat to NURV's technology supremacy. Killing well over half a dozen young programmers and threatening many more to ensure his position is never threatened, Gary tries to do the same to Milo Hoffman for investigating his crimes, and forces a delinquent woman to seduce Milo lest Gary send her back to prison on trumped-up charges.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The film is essentially one giant Take That! at Microsoft, complete with their chief rival Apple providing Product Placement. This became ironic in two ways.
  • Even at the time, the videotaped interviews on the film's official website could only be viewed using Apple's proprietary QuickTime format. What happened to your Open Source message, guys?
  • More importantly, if one fast-forwards to today, they will find that it's Apple that has come to define the modern image of the tech behemoth, being accused of a lot of the same stuff that Microsoft was at its peak and then some (having a near-monopoly on MP3 players in the '00s, their infamous "terms of service" agreements). Looking back, one could compare Synapse, the evil, corporate-dominated network created by NURV, to the "gated community" that Apple has created for its iDevices, especially in comparison to its open-source rival Android. Bill Gates, meanwhile, has seen his reputation rehabilitated since his official departure from Microsoft, spending his time since then focused more on charity work with his wife Melinda.
• Unintentional Period Piece: It was filmed during the height of the dot-com boom and hit theaters only a short time after the bubble started leaking. As such, the hacker and geek culture this film portrays is a snapshot of what it was like to have a good idea literally programmed in a garage and be able to get millionaire venture capitalists ready to front money on almost a moment's notice once they saw it. It also portrays the then-very-prevalent skepticism towards Microsoft, with Apple being little-regarded because of its waning market share.

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