Respond to these rapid questions in our Blackhat quiz and we will tell you which Blackhat character you are. Play it now.
Even when his characters aren’t moving, Michael Mann makes action movies. His films are self-reflective; they are both about what is happening and what it represents. Whether the characters are running, driving, punching, or shooting, or merely brooding in close-up as electronic music shimmers and drones, they are attuned to the intellectual and emotional undercurrents whirling around them.
All of which makes him an eerily appropriate director for the thriller “Blackhat,” which stars Chris Hemsworth as a burly computer hacker who assists a team of FBI and Chinese intelligence officers as they pursue cyberterrorists across Chicago, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, and Jakarta. “Blackhat” is a high-tech action thriller about the human condition, slick and occasionally silly as it is. There isn’t a greater contemporary example, in the words of the creator of this website, “it’s not what a movie is about, it’s how it’s about it,” that I can think of.
Mind you, “Blackhat” is by no means a faultless film. It doesn’t pay the same meticulous attention to plot mechanics as it does to technological aspects, despite its unwavering trust in them. Key roles are underwritten or incorrectly cast. Nicholas Hathaway, played by Hemsworth, is an unbelievable figure who is a keyboard wizard on a furlough from prison to help find cyberterrorists who are stealing fortunes and destroying nuclear plants. Figure “A.” “Blackhat” fabricates a biography to support this brilliant self-taught individual who can fight and shoot like John Wick, navigate radioactive nuclear reactors while wearing a hazmat suit, and utter mirrored epigrams in a Noo Yawk accent (“I did the time; time isn’t doing me”). Despite Hemsworth’s charisma, Hathaway still comes out more as a list of amazing than as a reliable source. The same is somewhat true of his worldwide and ethnically diverse team of partners in justice. They include FBI agents Henry Pollack (John Ortiz), Mark Jessup (Holt McCallany), and Carol Barrett, a sensitive/fearful brother-sister team played by Leehom Wang and Wei Tang (Viola Davis). These characters are frequently lit and positioned rather than being investigated, which is more than can be said for most Mann photographs.
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This seems like the best course of action at times. By establishing that Hathaway and Chen were college roommates who love and respect each other, the movie avoids the cliché of “partners hate each other at first, then learn to work together.” Their embrace after reuniting serves as a visual cue that allows us to accept their Crockett-and-Tubbs-style two-brained hive mind right away. In the midst of the snooping and chasing, the semi-obligatory love story between Hathaway and Lien is a Wong-Kar Wai paradise, complete with sensual smiles and covert embraces. Leehom Wang exudes a seductive elegance as his necktie ripples as he dances across the screen.
Blackhat Quiz
However, there are times when you’ll wish “Blackhat” had given each character an extra minute or two of focus so they would stand out like the criminals and law enforcement in “Heat” and “Collateral.” If you do buy them, it’s because Davis is a standout; her side-eye may be recorded as a weapon; it’s a rare thriller that constructs a worldview to go with its world; and because the performers have committed to the film’s hallucinogenic intensity while still projecting idiosyncratic, personal attributes.
Also, you will find out which character are you in this Blackhat quiz.
Depending on how you feel about the director, you may refer to this film as “Michael Mann’s Greatest Songs,” but all the hits have been remixed and rethought. Fans of “Collateral” and “Heat” will find enough fighting, shooting, and brooding in “Blackhat,” which was written by Mann and Morgan Davis Foehl, shot by Stuart Dryburgh (of “The Piano” and “Ameila”), and edited by a group of editors. There is also a bumper crop of iconic Mann images, including daytime and nighttime skylines, existentially empty roads, police officers and criminals posed against post-industrial landscapes, soulmates While the movie’s heroes stress over virtual conspiracies and keep an eye out for coldblooded murders being despatched by shadowy masters, these Mann-erisms feel particularly poignant because they celebrate light, space, architecture, and flesh.
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The world of ones and zeros that “The Matrix” depicted for us fifteen years ago is now reality. The main focus of “Blackhat” is what happens when the real world is invaded by the virtual: what happens to relationships and geography; how it interferes with our sense of time as a sequence of discrete moments; and how it replaces that sense with an existence that can seem like an unending, intrusive buzz. When “Blackhat” goes silent, like when the camera focuses on lovers’ hands in a post-coital closeup or when the recently laid off Hathaway pauses on the airport tarmac and appreciates the open space, it’s powerful because you’ve been given a gift that is rarely given outside of the movie theater: a brief moment of peace.
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In addition to being a stealthy eulogy for a disappearing way of seeing and living, the movie is also a sound and light spectacle. Rage, rage against the death of the real! You are prompted by the filmmaking to consider the physicality and tangibility of what you see onscreen—to consider actions as actions, people as people, and objects as objects. Gunshots are deafeningly loud, the sun and streetlights are blindingly bright, and the landscapes and skylines are awesomely huge. Not just because the sound effects are loud and the camerawork is tactically “messy,” but also because these primitive actions are contrasted against the electronic violence committed by unseen cyber-criminals, makes you cringe when you see men fighting in a crowded diner and someone’s head smashing against a table, or when Hathaway repeatedly slams the flat end of an axe-head against a metal screen. Instead than attacking already-existing buildings, organizations, and institutions directly, the bad guys undermine or confuse them until they collapse, only bringing in armed guards when it is absolutely required.
The movie’s prologue is the best illustration of how fictional treachery may actually cause havoc. It’s a masterpiece of wordless explanation that uses a visual metaphor to show how hackers can get past electronic firewalls and infect a nuclear power plant’s computer system, turning off cooling fans and overheating the core rods. You don’t need to be an expert in computers to comprehend what is going on. In point-of-view pictures that resemble a Stalker Cam in a horror movie or the shark in “Jaws,” CGI graphics of pulsing dots spreading and reproducing like cancer cells while swimming across fiber-optic connections and circuit boards can help you understand it.
There are more instances where the virtual and “real” merge together, such as the scene where Hathaway suspects that he and a workmate are being watched in a restaurant. He gets up from his seat and wanders through the dining room (in a lengthy, uninterrupted handheld shot) until he finds the surveillance camera control panel that is transmitting images off-site. The movie’s plot culminates in a time-travel sequence that transports us from the 21st century to perhaps the 18th. It’s personal, passionate, and savage; blood and flesh are torn apart. Is that concrete enough for you, asks Davis’ character.
For more personality quizzes check this: Big Eyes Quiz.
