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 employeeโ€ฆ

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...