A trillion-dollar, top-secret next big thing.

A trillion-dollar, top-secret next big thing.

This is the near future. A sleek black helicopter flies toward a place that looks like the Arctic. Miles upon miles of hills and fields are covered in ice and snow. There is only one passenger in the helicopter; he is a young employee, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson, who in this film looks like a young Bill Gates, and with good reason), of a huge internet corporation that’s very much like Facebook. It is, in fact, called Bluebook (a name based on a book of lectures delivered by the early-20th-century philosopher and logician Ludwig Wittgenstein). By cracking some difficult code, Caleb has won the honor of meeting his boss, Nathan (rising star Oscar Isaac), a man who has amassed the kind of fortune that can buy the whole Arctic and who has plans for his employee…

Charles Mudede—who writes about film, books, music, and his life in Rhodesia, Zimbabwe, the USA, and the UK for The Stranger—was born near a steel plant in Kwe Kwe, Zimbabwe. He has no memory...