The Internship: Twelve Years On

Elliot Forwell

What if the last honest tech movie was a Vince Vaughn comedy?

That question has been stuck in my mind for weeks. Because when you rewatch The Internship in 2025, it feels like a time capsule… an indication that we’ve lost our way. It’s not a perfect movie. But I think it captured something that the rest of us have been trying to articulate for years: that tech used to feel human.

Two washed-up salesmen (Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson) walk into Google HQ, totally out of their depth. The place is absurd: nap pods, indoor bikes, Quidditch. But what’s even more absurd, looking back, is how real it felt at the time. Google wasn’t just a company, it was a dream factory.

That’s what hit me on the rewatch. The movie didn’t sell us on code. It sold us on culture. On connection. On the idea that tech could be a place where people from outside the system could still matter. Fast-forward to 2025, and that world feels like ancient history.

Search feels like a memory. The whimsical parts - the Easter eggs, the playground vibe - have all been engineered out.

And it's not just Google. Tech at large feels like it’s lost the plot. The startup culture that once celebrated bold ideas and community is now largely driven by capital efficiency, market capture, and AI-generated sameness. It’s all very “smart,” very “scalable,” and very, very soulless.

So yeah, The Internship feels like science fiction now. Or maybe it was prophetic.

We don’t need to go back to the Google of 2013. That world is gone. But we do need to reclaim what made it feel alive in the first place: the sense of play, the curiosity, the belief that people (especially outsiders) could shape the future.

The Internship, after all, was a love letter to a version of tech that still had a soul.