Posted in: Comics, Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh | Tagged: Blackhat, entertainment, film, michael mann

The Hilarious Fun of Michael Mann's Blackhat – Look! It Moves! by Adi Tantimedh

Published Mon, 19 Jan 2015 08:30:27 -0600

Last updated Tue, 05 May 2015 05:52:09 -0500

Adi Tantimedh writes,

Warning: Spoilers

There's a reason many hardcore film fans are into Michael Mann.

He's one of the last hardcore proponents of Film Noir, a director who finds new ways to film a scene, a stickler for research and sociological detail, the high priest of the existential loner as epic hero. He turns cities into important characters in his movies instead of just backdrops. He is an auteur whose recurring themes and visual motifs are instantly recognisable and frequently ripped off by less directors.

So. Blackhat.

This is a movie that wants to update the cold, steely fatalism of Fritz Lang crossed with the noir cool of Jean-Pierre Melville and introduce cybercrime and cyberterrorism to the noir genre as a hacker is furloughed out of jail to help the Chinese militia and FBI catch a mystery hacker after he causes a Chinese nuclear plant to melt down and may be planning something even bigger.

Now, the problem is that Hollywood never gets hackers right and only ever do hysteria and paranoia when it comes that subject, and Blackhat doesn't buck that trend.

When movies are improbable, they tend to tread a thin line between "Wait, what?" and "NO F—ING WAY!!" This movie jumps over that line so often it's practically tap-dancing.

Nick Hathaway is the Most Improbable Action Hero ever in the History of Cinema and I love it. I'm laughing as I type that sentence. He's like one of William Gibson's hacker heroes reimagined as a Nietzschean ubermensch. Not only is he a master hacker with the body of a Norse God of Thunder, but he also possesses Sherlock-level abilities of deduction and understanding of the criminal mind. He's also badass enough to take out three burly Korean gangsters with a broken bottle and a table, handle guns better than any of the law enforcement officials around him, is a tactical genius who can improvise weapons and body armour from household objects, and can shank a man to death better than any lifer at San Quentin. In fact, he is so superior that the cops let him go with them into shootouts!

The villain's entire plot makes no sense whatsoever. SPOILER: his endgame is to flood Malaysia's tin mines so he can make a killing in tin futures on the stock market. Now, he was able to hack the stock exchange to grab $74 million dollars by shorting soy stocks. He plans to use that money to make a profit from the tin futures. That means he has no reason to do what he does that kicks off the whole movie and gets that many people killed and putting himself on the World's Most Wanted List with the US and China after him. He really didn't need to test out a piece of malware by causing a nuclear reactor to melt down as a test-run for to flood the tin mines in Malaysia. He can already hack the stock market and get away with it, why doesn't he just do it again without massive loss of life? He wouldn't need a bunch of bloodthirsty mercenaries as his muscle who would provide all the violence and action that an action movie demands. When we finally meet him, he looks like everyone's stereotype of a fat internet troll with an unearned nihilistic existential outlook rather than a spotty teenager or Russian 20something sending spam. He's not a Bond villain. He's a Bond villain's idiot cousin that the family is too embarrassed to talk about at annual gatherings. It's like he wants Chris Hemsworth to come and murder him horribly. Then again, I've always wondered if Bond villains really subconsciously want James Bond to come and murder them horribly…

And it just occurred to me: the plot of Blackhat is really a James Bond plot. Ridiculous and outlandish scheme, overblown villain with nasty henchmen, love interest that throws herself at the hero, globe-trotting and violence in exotic locations with the locals as furniture? That's totally a Bond plot. The only difference is Blackhat is not a James Bond movie. If it was, it would probably end up making half a billion dollars worldwide like Skyfall did, since that movie had an even more idiotic plot and overblown hacker villain with even more ludicrous notions of computers and hacking. It's just the James Bond brand that made it a massive hit.

You can slam the story as much as you want, but the filmmaking is hardly hackwork. Mann had hackers as consultants to get all the details of hacking right. There are sumptuous shots throughout the movie where Mann finds new ways to film the world to make you feel like you're there in Hong Kong, Malaysia or Jakarta, not afraid to let the image become murky like it was shot on someone's phone. He makes CGI footage of data moving through computer networks look foreboding and frightening, turns Hong Kong into a cold, existential noir landscape, repeats his usual motifs of the existential hero staring pensively into the horizon and stages action and ruthless violence with as much verve as ever, bullet-pierced bodies arching elegantly in the air… His camera is restless, obsessive with communicating the pulse of life in the landscapes he shoots. It's just too bad the script gets the idea of criminal hackers so ludicrously wrong. Kevin Poulsen, one of the consultants, has said that he hopes Congress don't see the movie because it might make them so paranoid that they'll introduce draconian and counterproductive laws that will only make things worse.

Don't get me wrong, I had a thoroughly good time watching the movie, and if I was watching it drunk, I would have laughed my arse off through the whole thing (annoying the other people there and perhaps gotten thrown out) and still felt I got my money's worth, fully aware that it's complete and utter nonsense. Blackhat is not a good movie, but it's a well-made movie, and I suspect it'll become a minor cult for people who like so-ridiculous-it's-fun movies. Too bad it might add to misunderstanding and paranoia, though.

All is virus at lookitmoves@gmail.com

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