Blackhat
2015 · Directed by Michael Mann
Original language: English
- crime
- thriller
- action
The story
Nicholas Hathaway, a furloughed convict, and his American and Chinese partners hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta. As Hathaway closes in, the stakes become personal as he discovers that the attack on a Chinese nuclear power plant was just the beginning.
What it’s like
Cold blue and sodium-orange night light, with Michael Mann's signature digital handheld work: restless close camera in crowded rooms, long wide shots of glass towers, rain-slicked streets in Chicago and Los Angeles, and the humid green sprawl of Jakarta and Hong Kong. Screens throw their glow across faces, and the image has a crisp, glossy digital sheen rather than grain. The score is a pulsing electronic and ambient hum, with sudden percussive stops that land like keystrokes. Its vibe is tense, cool and clinical, the mood of a late-night city run on fluorescent restlessness and quiet dread. It suits a focused night alone or a long-haul flight where you want to stay locked in. Pacing is brisk and procedural, with long stretches of typing, tracing and planning broken by sharp bursts of violence: brief gunfire, a hard fist fight, and a fatal explosion, all quick and abrupt rather than lingering gore. Sexual content is minimal. Emotionally it is cool and grim, with a lonely, hardened man slowly bonding with partners he distrusts. For people who want a stylish, humourless techno-thriller with brisk momentum and moody city textures.
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