He’s like Luke Skywalker riding into Tataouine, or Tom Cruise turning up for his first day of work at ‘The Firm’. Except the stakes are a lot higher and the risks that much greater. Or that’s pretty much how Sliding Doors director Peter Howitt first saw the story of Antitrust, his debut Hollywood movie. It’s about how a computer geek called Milo (Ryan Phillippe) turns his back on his friends and their tiny software start-up company - which will basically operate out of a garage - and goes to work for NURV. NURV has nothing to do with garages: it is a multi-billion-dollar software company and it offers him the world. But, as with all such offers, there is a price.

“I really see Antitrust as a young man’s journey into facing reality,” says Howitt. “In the beginning, Milo is a techno wizard who has spent most of his life in front of a computer. He has tunnel vision – he’s only interested in that screen, in that code. But as the story progresses, he’s forced to look beyond the computer screen and see what’s really going on around him. He has to start using his heart and soul as well as his brain. He has to learn who to trust and who not to trust. What helps him to survive is learning to pull the truth out from this world of smoke and mirrors.”

Antitrust is an action thriller set in the cut-throat world of the computer industry. And it’s Ryan Phillippe’s throat that’s on the line. Max Levant reports.

‘Smoke and mirrors’ may not sound much like Silicon Valley, but then NURV - which stands for ‘Never Underestimate Radical Vision’ - is no ordinary computer company. It’s working towards a breakthrough in Digital Convergence - the next holy grail in the software world, which will enable all forms of digital communication to understand one another (see box on page 21). Digital devices don’t always do that at the moment, as anyone who has ever tried to open an e-mail attachment knows. But when they do - and everyone reckons that’s not too far away - an information superhighway will open up like nothing you ever dreamed of.

NURV’s mega-rich boss, Gary Winston (Tim Robbins), is well on the way towards achieving this. But he has an agenda which goes beyond the power that such a discovery will give him - an agenda which goes to the source of power itself. Think Bill Gates combined with James Bond’s Goldfinger. For the time being, Winston needs Milo (for whom he was an early role-model); but he is also playing a sinister game with his young recruit, who finds himself first pursued in the recruitment sense, then pursued in the literal sense - the prey of a plot he only slowly begins to understand. So it’s not just his heart and soul that Milo needs: it’s all the other bits that go to make up an action hero, as Gary the mentor becomes Gary the foe.

Rachael Leigh Cook as Lisa, his ally when things turn nasty.

“To Milo,” says Phillippe, “Gary represents the guy who has the power to change the world, to alter life as we know it. Milo sees himself as Gary at a younger age, but he doesn’t see everything about Gary at first. The way Tim plays Gary, you really get a sense that there are two sides to him. You see why Milo worships him but also how he can suddenly behave in a completely opposite way.”