'Blackhat' shows it isn't easy dramatizing cyber intrigue
The timing of the Michael Mann cyber-thriller 鈥淏lackhat鈥� could not be聽more fortuitous, but the film itself seems ripped less from the headlines聽than from the perfervid imagination of Mann in full 鈥�Miami聽Vice鈥� mode.
Chris Hemsworth plays Nicholas Hathaway, a cyber genius whose聽prison sentence for hacking violations is commuted so he can track down聽the perpetrator of a malware attack on a Chinese nuclear reactor 鈥� for聽starters. Nicholas鈥檚 Massachusetts Institute of Technology roommate, Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang), now a Chinese military official, is his cohort; his sister, Lien Chen聽(Wei Tang), is the decorative systems engineer who, of course, falls for聽Nicholas as they scamper through Hong Kong, Indonesia, and Malaysia聽tracking the bad guys.
Despite the plethora of car chases and shootouts, shot in torrid聽colorations, my favorite part of the movie was its opening sequence: an聽expertly diagrammed five-minute animated rendering of code speeding聽through a network. We鈥檝e come a long way since 鈥淭ron.鈥澛�
The human interactions are somewhat less exciting. I don鈥檛 begrudge聽Mann and his screenwriter Morgan Davis Foehl for their overemphasis聽on standard-issue shootouts 鈥� it鈥檚 never been easy dramatizing cyber聽intrigue. Still, given our brave new cyber world, someone in Hollywood聽is going to have to come up with a better way to do it. Watching actors聽tap out code as big buzzing screens of digital data flash on the screen just聽doesn鈥檛 cut it.
Do cyber whizzes look like Chris Hemsworth, best known for playing聽Thor? I鈥檓 sure some do, although I doubt there are many who also appear聽to qualify as decathletes. That鈥檚 fine. Even though the filmmakers try to聽make us believe we鈥檙e witnessing a real-world dystopia, this is a Hollywood聽movie after all. Grade:聽C+ (Rated R for violence and some language.)
