By Brenton Thom BLACKHAT is a crime/action/thriller from director Michael Mann. It stars Chris Hemsworth as Nick Hathaway, a former hacker and coding genius. The premise of the movie is pretty straightforward: everything in the world is connected by the internet, and in the opening scene, a cooling fan in a nuclear power plant in China is shutdown, which causes a chain reaction resulting in it overheating and exploding. An unknown hacker snuck into the control server and flooded it with a virus code. The hacker used malware to hide the attack and prevent anyone seeing what he’s doing. Does this make sense so far? After the catastrophic opening, we meet a mysterious man in a hotel room looking over code. This is Chen Dawai, played by Leehom Wang, whom we find out works for the Chinese government as a Computer Security agent. He meets with the FBI and asks for help to stop this threat. The NSA and other agencies are reluctant, but he informs them that part of the virus that was written by him, and the other half by his college friend, Nick Hathaway (Hemsworth). We then meet Hathaway, our protagonist, who is in prison for cyber bank robberies. Since the government is in need of his help, he demands to get his sentence pardoned. Now that he’s out and has the US government looking over his shoulder, he must track down this mysterious hacker. It is said throughout the movie and that his hacker has declared no motives, such as finance, politics or anything of that nature. So it’s a matter of trying to figure out what is driving this person. The cons: some of the hacking and coding stuff is unrealistic. Unless you know computer terminology or understand networking it’s not really coherent. But for the general audience, they should understand it just fine. Chris Hemsworth as Hathaway is also problematic. Hathaway is this genius coder who went to MIT and is incredibly book smart, but Chris Hemsworth is a large guy. He’s got muscles and is ripped. Realistically, why would a nerd be so huge? Most of their time is spent behind a computer or book, not pumping weights. There iss a bit of dialogue where he mentions that before he went to prison, he would get in fights, so that makes you wonder how this genius guy could sculpt his body at the same time. Another odd con is the sound quality. Like Michael Mann's previous film, PUBLIC ENEMIES, BLACKHAT has terrible sound mixing. There are points where audio fluctuates through dialogue and becomes either incredibly quiet or too loud. The action scenes with the movie were loud (and that’s not really a con, it’s more a pro), but the consistency of the audio was a serious problem. The pros: this movie has some cool visuals and simulations to show data packets travelling through lines and processors as bits of ones and zeroes. Realistically the whole thing happens in nanoseconds, but because it's a movie, they slow it down and show you the paths these packets take and where they travel to. The movie is solid and an enjoyment to watch for the first 2 acts. You care for the characters and for the most part everything seems realistic. My biggest concern is the movie's third act, and specifically the reveal of the hacker and his motives. Now if you don’t want any SPOILERS, I suggest you skip to the next paragraph. In the marketing (and even within the film) we are constantly told this hacker is not about politics or money, making it some big mystery why he's doing these things. In the end, however, turns out it was all just about money after all... a big convoluted plot for money. He even hacks the Chicago stock exchange (millions of dollars, mind you) for cash. He uses that money as capitol to invest in an ore field, and plans to use the attack to destroy a bunch of mining fields just so he can get even more money. So, it was a complete lackluster ending. All this work and mystery just for money. It was a big letdown. Overall, I enjoyed this movie, with exception of the third act. I would recommend it to general audiences. The audio is a bit dicey but I’d definitely recommend this movie for home viewing. If you like to see action movies and want to see some excitement on the screen and a bit of mystery, definitely check it out.
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