By Tony Frame. Contains very mild spoilers.

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First off the bat I’ll kindly let you all know that I have zero interest in animated films. I have no interest in Toy Story, Manga, or anything in that genre at all. So imagine my delight when filmmaker Graham Jones emailed me to ask if I could write something for his animated feature Silicon Docks. I was hesitant, obviously, but when I watched the trailer on YouTube it caught my attention for two reasons: firstly because I liked the idea that some of the world’s richest people would be in a movie together, and secondly; because the animation reminded me of the ONLY animated film that has ever caught my interest in the last thirty years – Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006). So, I decided to give Silicon Docks a go…

Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey (to name a few) arrive in Dublin at the Silicon Docks – a real place (that I didn’t know about) that hosts the European headquarters of some of the world’s biggest tech giants, corporations like Facebook, Twitter and Google et al. Marissa Mayer (former CEO of Yahoo) seems to be the one tasked with trying to get all these billionaires to agree on voting against a European law by midnight. But getting all of these captains of industry to agree unanimously is no mean feat, and the clock is ticking…

Now I’m a stickler for detail by the way; the law in question could have been clarified a bit more for my liking, but I got the gist of it; it’s something that is bad for our protagonists and their corporations, their business practices. Maybe the law involved paying taxes, or restricted their zero-hours contracts, or maybe it allowed their workers more breaks and better pensions. Oh the list could go on and on and on, couldn’t it? But that’s the point of Jones’s Silicon Docks; it’s a satire that takes the mick out of these exceedingly wealthy tech giants, entrepreneurs and philanthropists, some of whom are Gods to their fans all around the world.

Images courtesy of Graham Jones

One of the things I liked about Docks was it’s chilled-out vibe which makes it feel like it belongs in the Linklater universe, and then there’s the whimsical squabbling along the way and throughout with our protagonists, which is probably closer to the truth than any Tesla employee or Amazon warehouse worker would admit to (at least on the record). Like the moment when Marissa is trying to convince Elon Musk to vote against the aforementioned law going through, but he states unequivocally that he’ll basically do the opposite of whatever Bezos votes. It’s this kind of pettiness that I’d imagine would (and probably does) play out in real life, so this, in essence, is art imitating life and vice-versa.

For a low-budget film that was made in 2020 under real Covid-19 restrictions, there’s a lot to admire. The writing is insightful in places (the world’s biggest taxi company doesn’t own any cars, the world’s biggest hotel company doesn’t own any hotels), with the characters and their relationships feeling real, like they had endured each others company in a previous outing and were now accustomed to one another’s quirks and misgivings and bad habits. The animation was excellent, the sound design was sublime (I used headphones and the mix was crystal clear), and I especially loved the soundtrack. The pace of the plot was something that could have been improved slightly, perhaps, and I think the addition of title-cards at the beginning (introducing each character) would have helped the viewer identify who each of the protagonists were. We all know who Musk and Bezos and Zuckerberg are, but I had to Google (ironically) who Larry and Sergey and a couple of the others were, predominantly for my own curiosity.  Larry and Sergey created Google by the way.

There was only one major let-down for me – a party at Bono’s house which never came to fruition. I think if such a scene was included it would have elevated it just that little bit more (I would’ve like to have seen Musk and Bezos get shit-faced on Guinness and have a go at each other with fisticuffs, only for Bono to get in the middle and get punched in the process), but that minor quibble aside, I think Silicon Docks deserves a place on a more mainstream platform like Netflix and Prime Video, even Mubi. It’s got all the makings of being a cult classic; it’s poetic in places and has a dream-like aura at times, and even though I thought it lacked some proper laugh-out-loud humour, I still had an entertaining time watching it. So give it a watch, it’s free to view on YouTube at present (video below).