It’s not an Oscar contender (that qualifying run didn’t happen), so what is "Blackhat"? Michael Mann’s latest is a crime thriller and meticulous procedural like many of his previous films (we may know someone who has seen it). According to the New York Times, the movie sounds a little eccentric in that it opens with a “nearly five-minute dramatization of code speeding through a network, shooting lights and grids, and a reverse internal shot of a keystroke.” Mann got a 3D computer model from the company Qualcomm to help visualize the sequence and make it as accurate as possible. In fact, he went to great lengths to understand the absolute fundamentals of how hacking works—which meant going back to the very, very, very basics. “What’s electricity? How does it flow? It’s not linear. How does a single transistor work? How do these chips work?” he asked himself. Suffice it to say, if you’ve heard Mann is super granular and painstaking in his approach to everything, the filmmaker hasn’t changed.
He hasn’t slowed down either. “There was not one day that he slept more than four hours,” actor Wang Leehom said in the Times interview about the production that had a 66-day shoot on 74 locations. “He had to have two assistants on rotation to keep up with him.” Damn.
Here’s the official synopsis the of the movie:
Set within the world of global cybercrime, Legendary’s Blackhat follows a furloughed convict and his American and Chinese partners as they hunt a high-level cybercrime network from Chicago to Los Angeles to Hong Kong to Jakarta.
Starring Chris Hemsworth, Viola Davis, Tang Wei, and Wang Leehom, “Blackhat” is right around the corner and opens up in theaters next week (it also just landed fairly high in our Most Anticipated Films of 2015 list). And so, Universal has released a new seven-minute, highly informative cyber-hacking featurette, a new TV spot, and some new photos from the film. Watch below and get pumped for Mann’s immersive picture, which lands in theaters on January 16th.
