Blackhat (Michael Mann, 2015)

[John Cope]

Essentially this seems to be as I predicted: Miami Vice 2, in that it's very uninterested in telling a conventional story and more interested in mood, texture, and urban poetry.

This is about the best possible review of it I could hope to hear. I also heard someone else remark about its prominent abstraction in terms of its formal qualities, with an emphasis on surfaces again, space flattened out between objects. That's enough for me!

[oh yeah]

Essentially this seems to be as I predicted: Miami Vice 2, in that it's very uninterested in telling a conventional story and more interested in mood, texture, and urban poetry.

This is about the best possible review of it I could hope to hear. I also heard someone else remark about its prominent abstraction in terms of its formal qualities, with an emphasis on surfaces again, space flattened out between objects. That's enough for me!

Yup, precisely. Some of the negative reviews had me a bit worried at first, but it seems that almost all of these critics didn't much like Vice or Public Enemies either. I'm excited beyond words to see what Mann has done with the form this time, and even if the film is the "bloodless" style-over-substance disappointment a critic like Stephanie Zacharek says it is, I'd still be entranced by the visual poetics. Plus, Mann's vision of Hong Kong, Jakarta and Malaysia. Between this film, Ali, Miami Vice, and all the rest, he's some kind of cinematic globetrotter, most of his films restlessly hopping from city to city.

[Feiereisel]

Just back from an early showing--aggressively "Mann", which means I enjoyed it immensely.

The film pushes at the limits of the perceptible, through its use of roughhouse digital photography or by drilling down to the sub-micro level to track a fleet of electrical impulses during a cyber-attack. The computer-guts dramatization verges on the abstract, but it brings a visceral intensity to the otherwise microscopic malice.

It also provides a blueprint for the aesthetic of the film, which emphasizes locations with repeated vertical lines and functionally repetitious buildings like skyscrapers and high rises. The real-world spaces evoke the uniform, geometric look of the digital realm, framing the computer-connected contemporary world as an extension of the gray-black computer space of the opening scenes. The characters, then, seem to double as the flashing bits of data; they move through the abstracted spaces on single-minded, search-and-destroy missions.

Those characters are thin, even by Mann-shorthand standard, which is perhaps the film's most noteworthy failing. It seems cribbed and curiously rote, even for a veteran archetype-recycler like Mann. Hemsworth's Hathaway is a Mann-protagonist patchwork--there's a touch of Frank, a dash of McCauley, a liberal helping of Crockett, and even a bit of Will Graham in the mix.

Mann broaches a bit of new territory, though, in making Hathaway's acclimatization to the openness and freedom of the civilian world after being furloughed from prison one of the film's through-lines.

Spoiler

Just out of prison, he marvels at the flat expanse of an airport runway; he and Lien view Los Angeles from a vantage point before a romantic embrace; they find emotional refuge in a private plane as it soars into the sky after they go on the run; in the final shot they walk toward the camera until they escape the film entirely.

In fact, many of the film's characters seem curiously guarded ("underdeveloped" in crit-speak), but I'm not sure that it's an unintentional lapse on Mann's part as much as it is a storytelling choice given the compromised-via-computers world of the film. Hathaway's rage at discovering he's been spied on through a remotely controlled camera during a Thief-like across-the-table conversation seems indicative of this. The more the characters allow of themselves, the weaker their positions seem to become. It's a bit of a stretch, perhaps, but given that the film is largely about the potentially dire cost of (digital) intrusion, every bit of backstory and personality glimpsed or inferred seems like a piece of guarded data the viewer has managed to surreptitiously download.

Also of concern is the digitization of natural space--characters augment the environment to abet their digital chicanery, for example, and characters are glimpsed through computer screens as they're tracked and spied on digitally. Mann collapses the gap between digital and actual space through the way characters operate as much as he does with visual matches, and physical actions are presented as crucial parts of the film's digital intrusions.

I need to chew on the film while longer to see if any more themes or motifs jump out at me, but I enjoyed myself. Mann's preoccupations and stylistic impulses surge through the film--it plays a lot like a Manhunter/Miami Vice hybrid. I think fans of his work will find a lot of interesting stuff to sift through.

Those who dislike Mann may want to adjust their expectations accordingly. (If they had any to begin with, that is.)

[oh yeah]

Saw it tonight and absolutely loved it -- my expectations were lowered because of the unusually negative reviews, but I think this ranks among Mann's best work. Here's some stuff I banged out after I got home:

The critic Ben Sachs recently, and rightfully, called Michael Mann "our greatest living image-maker." The word choice is not willfully obscure or idiosyncratic; nor, of course, is the implication here that Mann makes some brand of style-over-substance feature-length music videos which shine and sparkle but lack deeper content. Rather, the point is that Mann is one of the very few filmmakers still living who believes in the power of cinema -- more specifically, in the image -- as a thing unto itself which can elicit powerful emotional affects, and can say more about the supposed plot or theme of the film than any vomited verbalization. This is why Mann has frequently cited Blade Runner and Apocalypse Now among his favorite films; they are vibrant and powerful demonstrations of the image triumphing over all language and any potential left-brained nitpicking about their conception of "realism" or the actor not looking the part or the plot not being plausible.

Mann makes right-brained films. Blackhat's most powerful moments are things you feel viscerally, physically, intensely, instead of dryly observing; conversely, even the film's most inconsequential interludes have an undeniable abstract beauty to the framing, lighting, depth of field (or lack thereof) and an opiated isolation-tank hum to the sound design which, above all, seeks total viewer immersion. Increasingly since the new millennium, Mann wants you right there in the action, pulled along effortlessly by those intoxicating images instead of obligatorily dragged along by the ear with some mystery-obliterating exposition-dump. Sure, there is talk in Blackhat -- quite a lot, in fact, compared to the spare and subdued Public Enemies, another masterful and fully experiential picture -- but it is largely besides the point. The point resides in the startling physicality of an automatic weapon as it fires ceaselessly; in the electric Hong Kong night with its smudges of impressionistic color; in the robotic, rhythmic machine-gun clonk-clonk-clonk of knife repeatedly penetrating flesh and bone which resembles more a swift firing of keystrokes than a life being snuffed out; in the merciless dialectics of the cutting which brings to mind another favorite of Mann's, Battleship Potemkin; in the film's deeply felt picture of life in the 21st century, continued from Miami Vice but even more bleak and nihilistic, in which the modern world is but a cash-operated, ATM-lined Panopticon that is always under surveillance (the jailed Hathaway is introduced reading Baudrillard, with Foucault's Discipline and Punish visible in the background).

Blackhat is a paradox and an enigma; at once the most fully abstracted and "purely" cinematic film Mann has made, as well as an utterly gripping thriller and one of his leanest narratives. Its resolutely non-commercial nature, though, ultimately wins out and has already ensured that most people will find little of value here as long as they continue to search for left-brained stimulation in an essentially experimental film about images and sound, touch and taste and color and rhythm and feeling. But those more interested in and attuned to the audacious sensory experience of it all, where theme and character are revealed in minimalistic formal brush-strokes, will find a masterful tone poem made by a consistently misunderstood artist who has only ever taken on "genre" pictures in the first place so that he can find the poignant ambiance and the pure cinematic experience that resides underneath their cacophonous surface.

[Buttercream]

As a fan of Mann's late period digital works, I'd say Blackhat is among his best. Though I agree that it isn't as a solid as Miami Vice, Manhunter, or Public Enemies, so do with that what you will.

It is probably his greatest achievement in balancing genre conventions and abstract formalism. It's difficult to tell exactly what is going on at a given moment, but you can ride the structure well enough to focus more on the emotional mood. His blending of different textures of feeling into one sprawling cosmos is top notch here.

I also want to say that a lot of the criticism of this film seems to decry how it fails to be something else, which has always been a strange position to take on any film for me, regardless of one's feelings on Mann. However, I do think Adam Nayman's critique over at Cinema Scope is the most engaging I've read that picks apart some of Mann's weaknesses.

Cinema Scope link: http://cinema-scope.com/currency/manns- ... -blackhat/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[DarkImbecile]

I should state out front that I am a vehement pro-Mann partisan: Heat and The Insider are all-time personal classics, closely followed by Thief, The Last of the Mohicans, and Collateral. Unfortunately, I spent the first 60% or so of Blackhat feeling like it was Mann's worst film since The Keep. I strongly suspected while watching it (and still do) that either the studio took the film away from him in editing (unlikely given his previous declarations of having final cut on every one of his films) or strongly pressured him to make some major changes, given the multiple instances of overdubbed dialogue and odd editing choices. In fact, (bizarre conspiracy theory alert!) it felt like

Spoiler

the sequence of events was significantly altered, and that the nuclear accident that opens the film was originally supposed to come well after the Chicago stock manipulations; I admittedly have no idea how Wang Leehom's character ends up in the US or Hemsworth's hacker is freed without that event happening first, but I'll be damned if that's not the impression the awkward stitching together of events and dialogue left on me*. Honestly, I feel like that would have been a stronger sequence of events, with a slower escalation of tension and attacks by the hacker and a consistent raising of stakes; it's hard to go from "nuclear disaster" to "commodity manipulation and code parsing" and remain perched on the edge of one's seat.

For most of the first 90 minutes, I felt like I was watching a pale shadow of Mann's work, with just enough of his trademark inspired camerawork, transcendent image-sound combinations, prominent professional criminal/prison themes, and blunt, ballsy dialogue (Viola Davis being perhaps the best purveyor of the latter) to make the uncharacteristic lack of structure and pacing stand out even more. Even those defenders of Mann who de-emphasize the importance of detailed, logic-driven plot and character in his films (among whom I count myself) would acknowledge that his best work is impeccably paced and built around dichotomies of character and/or steady, careful escalation of stakes; this is where the opening two-thirds of Blackhat fall far short of his best work. To be clear, this means that it still outperforms most contemporary thrillers, but was still a definite disappointment.

Luckily, in an inversion of the usual complaint about the drop in quality of a film's last act (especially in a heavily-plotted thriller like this), the film finally tightens its focus and raises its level of intensity with the

Spoiler

ambush that kills more than half of the protagonists and the subsequent hunt for revenge by Hemsworth and Tang Wei (who I was very happy to see again, having loved her performance in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution). This gunfight also features the most - for lack of a better term - completely badass action note in the whole film: Holt McCallany's slow, methodical dropping of half of the assault-weapon-blasting villains, with the sense of inevitability of the end result of being hopelessly outgunned building with each carefully aimed shot.

Beginning with this sequence, the final act plays out with the heightened emotions, vibrant colors, and dynamic, kinetic staging that finally made me feel that Mann was in total control of the film. The gorgeous images and at times excellent score finally had the emotional weight necessary to lend them the transcendental power I associate with one of my favorite directors.

So, in sum, I would tentatively recommend to other Mann fans, but with the caveat that I sincerely hope a smoother, restructured version is sitting on one of Mann's hard drives just waiting for a Blu-Ray release.



*Note: I will probably be damned anyway for unrelated reasons.

[Finch]

Interview with Mann at the Playlist about Blackhat

[Finch]

Keith Uhlich calls Blackhat sublime

[Galen Young]

It may not be Mann's best work by far, but I still enjoyed it overall. As cool as it looked, the interior computer animation bits felt a little too on the nose, considering the subject matter. Was surprised at how self-referential throughout it was to Mann's own work, right down to the Manhunter-like "Didn’t you, you son of a bitch?!" line of dialogue. That did pull me out of the moment.

[quote="DarkImbecile"]

Spoiler

...the sequence of events was significantly altered, and that the nuclear accident that opens the film was originally supposed to come well after the Chicago stock manipulations... Honestly, I feel like that would have been a stronger sequence of events, with a slower escalation of tension and attacks by the hacker and a consistent raising of stakes; it's hard to go from "nuclear disaster" to "commodity manipulation and code parsing" and remain perched on the edge of one's seat.

Looks like you were right, Mann mentions in this interview that

Spoiler

"I made one major shift in the movie, it’s a huge shift. The nuclear explosion used to occur after the storm drain, way late in the movie."

It did seem like an odd sequencing of events while watching, but not enough to completely ruin it for me.

[quote="DarkImbecile"]

Spoiler

...Holt McCallany's slow, methodical dropping of half of the assault-weapon-blasting villains...

Spoiler

The obvious reference being from Heat, of course -- I was thinking are we going to hear a Pacino-like breath before each pull of the trigger -- did it? Will have to see it again to try and catch it.

[Feiereisel]

Interesting about the shifting of the reactor attack--I think it holds together well as released in terms of structure, but I'd be curious to see how it worked as originally conceived. Maybe Mann or some intrepid fan will re-cut it as an experiment.

Does anyone know if the CG computer interior shots would remain in place at the beginning, or would the move along of the movie with the reactor stuff? Seems to me like the circuitboard shots would stay in place, but I'd need to sit down and really look at it to be sure.

Also, what do we figure the odds on an extended/director's cut will be? Any rumblings about that, other than Mann's talk of incident-shifting?

[mcnamara]

I'm a life-long Mann apologist. Blackhat is a solid albeit minor work. I think the major deficiencies spring from a classic mismatch of director and material. It seemed like the first half of the film, which focused on "hacking" and the back-and-forth digital tango between characters provided insufficient opportunity for Mann to deploy the physicality so common in his other, stronger work. Once the film introduces the Kassar character and his band of mercenaries, the story shifts gears into something Mann appears more comfortable with, and the film begins to take off. As a previous poster alluded to, the final 1/3 of the film is breathtaking, and redeems some of the failed ambition of the first half.

It's hypnotic in a way I didn't really appreciate until I had left the theater. Having said that, I really believe Mann is a director you either buy into 100% or else completely disregard, and I'm sure there will be plenty who don't connect with the film. As others have said, fans will like it, the overall quality is there and the digital photography alone is worth the price of admission.

[flyonthewall2983]

Spoiler

I'm glad Mann had the good sense to dress Yorick van Wageningen more as an extra from a porn film than the kind of intimidating character that Ritchie Coster (last seen as one of Kevin Dunn's band of misfits, or degenerates if you will, on Luck) winds up as.

[Feiereisel]

Spoiler

I'm glad Mann had the good sense to dress Yorick van Wageningen more as an extra from a porn film than the kind of intimidating character that Ritchie Coster (last seen as one of Kevin Dunn's band of misfits, or degenerates if you will, on Luck) winds up as.

I think the disparity between the looks and sensibilities of the two characters was a really nice touch. It plays with the idea of proxies and avatars and ties into the film's protection/penetration conflict and echoes some of the Max-as-Vincent beats from Collateral.

A week later, I'm still spinning bits of the last fifteen minutes of the film in my head, specifically

Spoiler

the shots of Hathaway tracking Sadak and his murderous entourage amongst the throngs of moving festival-goers.

Great images--a high point of Mann's digital period.

[oh yeah]

Been watching this repeatedly since I got the DVD/Blu the other day. I still think it's a fantastic film and one of Mann's finest works. In a way it feels like the film of his that functions most as a summation of all his major themes and quirks, and indeed there are a few oddly overt nods to his previous work in the dialogue, but overall it doesn't feel too self-conscious or like just a re-hash of old triumphs. In fact it feels excitingly new and strange, the way it's so focused on sensation above all else. Thus there's a kind of purity to it that's pretty sublime; everything is so pared-down, even more perhaps than in Vice and Enemies, that all that remains is abstracted bodies, movement, lights, color, bullets, blood. Well, a little more than that, but that's the feeling imparted by the film's incredibly minimalist and experimental (for a Hollywood film) style. I mean, theoretically this is Mann's pulpiest film since/along with Collateral, and it has a suspenseful pull I found similar to The Insider and Manhunter -- yet ultimately it feels like by far the most alienating, least commercial of all his films.

On this last viewing I found the ending particularly powerful, really, just the whole parade sequence onward serves as kind of the apotheosis of the film and its themes.

Spoiler

The way that Hathaway and Lien defiantly walk toward the camera in the final shot also strikes me as a deliberate reversal/reference of most of Mann's previous endings wherein the weary, defeated-looking hero walks away from the camera -- here they're weary but definitely not resigned or defeated, and that seems to echo Mann's own feeling as an artist who is increasingly marginalized and divisive; like Hathaway, he's not going to give up without a fight. It's no accident that Hathaway sports that Chicago accent so similar to Mann's own.

Also I feel like there may be something of a nod to Kubrick's 2001

Spoiler

which the film essentially reverses by starting with that Starchild's view of Earth from space and then regressing to the end where Hathaway uses primitive bone-like tools, screwdrivers and makeshift knives, jabbing them into his enemies repeatedly in the most savage way possible. Maybe just a coincidence but it struck me.

All in all, the film may be not as emotionally affecting and "major" a work as Miami Vice or Heat, his best films -- but I don't think it's too far off from second-tier masterpieces like The Insider, Manhunter and Public Enemies either. Like all of those films, it's endlessly re-watchable and seems to gain much with every viewing. Lots of detail in every single frame, and some of the compositions here are his most stunning and tactile. I love the sensually-enveloping aesthetic Mann has been evolving into ever since he started using digital; no one else makes films like these, with such an indelibly experiential, you-are-there feel -- this is what has always made Mann so special, but especially in the last decade. I eagerly await his next project, which is supposedly an Enzo Ferrari biopic.

[colinr0380]

Major spoilers:

Talk about a zero-sum game!

I really liked this, although I'm not sure it says too much more about the 'scary world of every system being interconnected through the internet and cyber-crime' than any other thriller showing dodgy international bank accounts being systematically filled and drained does. Although it is another in a series of what I like to call "Information Governance" films: after Brian de Palma illustrated in Passion that you should always password protect and lock your computer whenever leaving it unattended for any reason, Michael Mann shows here a couple of other major IG no-nos, those of never opening dodgy e-mail attachments, and especially that you should never stick a stranger's USB drive in your work computer! You'll only end up catching a virus!

(On that note, I did find it extremely amusing that the menu of the Blu-ray has a little scrolling message (the first I've seen on a Blu-ray, but then I haven't watched many Universal discs recently, so it might be a regular feature) that said "Your player is not connected to the internet. Connect your player to watch the latest trailers and enhance your interactive experiences". I assume that if I did connect my Blu-ray player up and then played Blackhat, I'd then be able to hack into my local power plant? Or maybe Universal would be able to take over control of my Blu-ray player remotely and turn it against me? Either way, I think I'll leave it disconnected for now!)

Its definitely a Michael Mann film though with there being a sense of fatalism in the final section towards taking out the bad guys whatever the cost that feels reminiscent of Thief (despite the love story). Also feeling similar to Thief was the laying out of the tools, including the computer gear, which sort of felt in the same vein as the interest in the safe-cracking procedural business, though not lingered on in as much loving detail perhaps due to the abstractions involved here. I also liked that early scene in the cafe between Hathaway and Lien, which is reminiscent of any number of earlier scenes in Mann's films, from Thief again to Heat. It is a moment for one party to lay themselves bare and relate their innermost feelings to the other, deepening the, impossible, connection between the pair.

There's also a Manhunter-style "I got you, you son of a bitch" moment of figuring out the bad guy's plan against a swelling score, which amusingly almost happens early in the film as Chris Hemsworth starts gravitating towards a window in order to look out of it pensively-knowingly before it gets curtailed, but then fully occurs at the beginning of the final act in Jakarta.

The style of the film was interesting. I most liked the way that the wide establishing shots of Hong Kong looked almost fake in a strange way (though I concede that this might just be the normal way that Hong Kong looks!), not quite at the gaudy excess of Enter The Void levels but reminding me a little of that, and I wonder if the intent was to have the skyscrapers look flattened and modular, like components slotted into a circuit board rather than real buildings. I kept getting the feeling that the real world was less vibrant and lively than the computer one that was in the process of replicating it.

I also liked that there were a few key scenes which featured a slow motion-to-regular speed change within a shot. My favourite of these was the post-release from prison scene on the airport runway in which Hathaway seems overwhelmed by the space and airiness all around him and stops for a long moment with the slow motion to take it all in. This same technique turns up again a few more times, in particular in the final parade sequence leading up to the fight.

Anyway I was also amused by the way that the film seems to boil down to someone just wanting to assert their intellectual property rights to ensure that they get paid properly for their work! Or it would be if the main plot wasn't a big McGuffin for, again as usual for a Michael Mann film, the love story.

I really liked the way that the love story was handled. It was extremely unsurprising for the first half that of course Hathaway and Lien would fall for each other and her brother would disapprove of it. And I was just waiting for the brother to inevitably get killed to motivate the couple still further. But the handling of this well-worn material was done extremely well, with the brother not being overly possessive of his sister to the extent of interfering in her relationships, but instead being respectful of their privacy despite airing his well-founded misgivings about the long term nature of their relationship. I also really liked that the inevitable death came at the perfect possible time, after the shootout that I assumed the brother would die in, and after Hathaway leaves the car to chase after Lien and ask her to make up with her brother. I think that many films would have gone more for the faux-drama of killing the brother with all of these unresolved issues of arguments not patched up, proper goodbyes not said and guilt for feeling somehow responsible left swirling around our main couple that they have to work through. I really appreciated that the film allowed for a conclusion to that relationship instead, and in some ways this turning point sequence is the one that made me really respect the film a lot more.

That sequence is an extremely effective one in the way that it efficiently and brutally narrows down the ensemble cast to our main couple (it also slightly strangely turns into Michael Mann's '9/11 film', something that feels a little shoehorned in at the late in the day mention but then quite beautifully pays off in a short but devastating dying character's fade-out p.o.v. shot of a skyscraper towering above them). It is really the end of one life and the beginning of another, the point at which the characters who think that they can exist within an organisation that is using them for its own ends realise that they have to make a break for it on their own and fight for their own personal freedoms. Very Last of the Mohicans!

It also kind of underlines that this is Lien's story, not Hathaway's. Lien is the one who is losing everything and becoming a stateless fugitive as her options get brutally narrowed down. This is part of why I love the sequence with her, Hathaway and her brother just before this, as she is fighting to make the decision of who to go with for herself rather than let either of the men in her life make it for her, even if they are both doing so for her own good. But it is an impossible choice, security or love, and eventually and ironically the film itself has to step in and remove the option for her. It is a devastating moment on lots of levels for the character. But in Hathaway leaving the car to run after Lien, she kind of saves his life.

This also leads me to the way that Michael Mann's films, despite being superficially about men doing manly things and clashing together in manly conflicts over manly powerplays, always feel as if they have a lot of compassion for the female characters. They're more often than not the more down to Earth and practical figures, but their tragedy is that they are unable to turn the men in their lives from pursuing their prescribed (self) destructive flights of fantasy, set in stone moral codes, or nihilistic revenge to the bitter end. Though in this case Lien is on side with Hathaway's plans, like most of the other female characters she is sidelined for the final showdown. But in Mann's more hopeful and romantic films, like this one, the female characters are able to return again, even if the long term future still looks to be a pretty tenuous one!

[colinr0380]

Spoiler

...the sequence of events was significantly altered, and that the nuclear accident that opens the film was originally supposed to come well after the Chicago stock manipulations... Honestly, I feel like that would have been a stronger sequence of events, with a slower escalation of tension and attacks by the hacker and a consistent raising of stakes; it's hard to go from "nuclear disaster" to "commodity manipulation and code parsing" and remain perched on the edge of one's seat.

Looks like you were right, Mann mentions in this interview that

Spoiler

"I made one major shift in the movie, it’s a huge shift. The nuclear explosion used to occur after the storm drain, way late in the movie."

It did seem like an odd sequencing of events while watching, but not enough to completely ruin it for me.

I also found this a bit jarring too for the way that the power plant blows up at the opening, then we go through the stock market and getting Hathaway out of jail and investigating the stock market stuff in between. Then we get scene of the cast in the helicopter passing over the still smouldering plant before jumping out and determinedly running through the chaos and injured people! I guess the destruction scene was moved to provide an opening big bang (it certainly helps to emphasise the seriousness of the computer hacking stuff with the two cyber-hacking scenes coming one after the other, repeating the same tiny actions to spark off a chain of chaos. It also amusingly gets all of the CGI 'flying through the computer' shots out of the way in one big chunk too, so the film can immediately start pushing the computer stuff further into the background), but this did cause me a little bit of confusion as I'd assumed that someone might have at least begun to clean up the power plant in the interim! And all our main characters seemed very hyped-up and on edge for an event that felt as if it had happened a long while ago!

[oh yeah]

I'm glad you brought up the editing of the power plant sequence, colin, because on reflection that's one of the few real problems I have with the film. More specifically, I'd say that there's a kind of structural messiness or sense of being "off," that's hard to explain but which plagues the film's first half or so. Strangely, everything from that car explosion onward flows just right, with a terrific momentum as well, but I think the rest of the film would probably qualify for being one of Mann's least polished works just in terms of how it's put together. It's not that there aren't incredible scenes and moments and even transitions between scenes in the first two acts, but that the whole of it feels rather misshapen or oddly structured. Hard to verbalize really, but just knowing that the power plant stuff originally came late in the film makes complete sense.

The other general problem for me is that the film lacks the extra-personal touch of works like Heat and Miami Vice and Thief which Mann wrote himself; I hope he gets back to writing his own films again because I think it makes a big difference. Collateral suffered much more from this, being a pretty hack-y script especially in the ending, but Blackhat also feels a bit too much like a Mann tribute album at times, or something. (It did not surprise me that the relatively unknown writer of BH is a reputed huge Mann fan -- I suspect that's why we get those oddly self-referential lines like "hola, chica" and the Manhunter soliloquy). Actually, I take back the comment in my earlier post because I'm not really certain how forward-looking and "new" this film is; in many respects it feels like a retread of Miami Vice but with some of its themes made more explicit. Formally it has a certain look to it that no other Mann picture has -- for just one thing, it largely lacks the use of deep focus that Mann typically employs, instead opting for a very shallow DoF -- but it's not terribly different from Vice either in the way it's composed. These are all pretty small problems though for what is likely to be my favorite film of the year; it's kind of like complaining about Mouchette being too similar to Au Hasard Balthazar. All great directors are likely to essentially "re-make" their films over and over in different forms.

As an aside, I find Hathaway's impassioned little "It's not about zeroes and ones!" speech, and the whole heightened scene that surrounds it, to be one of the most affecting in Mann's filmography. And the sheer movement and the flow of the red-shrouded paraders towards and against the defiantly green-cloaked Hathaway is visually and thematically stunning. Another one of my favorite moments comes right near the beginning: that silent, hypnotic helicopter shot that follows Chen's white car as it crosses a bridge. Only Mann could make such a simple image so compelling.

By the way, am I the only one surprised by how little music there is in the film? There's just silence or maybe the slightest of drones for most scenes, with only a few climactic ones getting real pulse-pumping loud accompaniment. For the most part it's a fascinatingly and deliberately quiet picture, which seems odd at first but I think adds to the overall alien ambiance of the film. It's certainly filled with far less music than Mann's other films; there even only seems to be one "pop" or rock song, the one Hathaway is listening to in prison, which is strange as typically Mann inserts a lot of contemporary music.

[colinr0380]

I'm glad you brought up the editing of the power plant sequence, colin, because on reflection that's one of the few real problems I have with the film. More specifically, I'd say that there's a kind of structural messiness or sense of being "off," that's hard to explain but which plagues the film's first half or so. Strangely, everything from that car explosion onward flows just right, with a terrific momentum as well, but I think the rest of the film would probably qualify for being one of Mann's least polished works just in terms of how it's put together. It's not that there aren't incredible scenes and moments and even transitions between scenes in the first two acts, but that the whole of it feels rather misshapen or oddly structured. Hard to verbalize really, but just knowing that the power plant stuff originally came late in the film makes complete sense.

Yes I'd definitely agree. While that power station scene being moved does feel like it'll become an issue, mainly for the rather clumsy in retrospect way the film handles it (suggesting that this was a bit of a last minute decision at the editing stage - caught earlier perhaps there could have been a bit of re-drafting of the script to accommodate the shift?), I do also wonder whether if the power station stuff was placed in a more 'plausible' area of the film it would destroy all the narrative momentum the film is building towards the wonderful final third. It might feel a bit too late for an inciting event to come at a third to halfway through the film, at least a massive disaster one on that kind of scale which would end up entirely defining the rest of the action by its fallout. Maybe that's what the filmmakers suddenly realised, that if it were put in more of a narratively coherent spot it would probably mess up the way that the film is in the process of shifting away from the larger scaled conflicts and into the personal one.

I also was captivated by that helicopter shot of the car, along with the plane later on! They are up there with the sublime transitional moments with boats in The Keep and Miami Vice at least!

[flyonthewall2983]

New director's cut screening at BAM next week.

[oh yeah]

Wow. This better get a release sometime for everyone else to see, though I wonder if that's even possible given how poorly the film did. I also wonder if Mann's new cut moves the reactor attack back to where it originally was -- close to the end of the film.

[The Fanciful Norwegian]

I'm also wondering if the plant will now be in mainland China, because I'm almost positive that's where it was supposed to be when they filmed those scenes—the staff speaks Mandarin, the signage is in Simplified Chinese, the police cars and emergency response units that show up are from mainland agencies, and moving the plant to Hong Kong in post-production is the sort of thing I can easily imagine a studio doing to keep on the good side of the mainland censors (not that it much mattered, since the film never got a mainland release anyway).

[hanshotfirst1138]

I didn't think this was as terrible as many critics suggested, though I do see why it got such a tepid reception. It has a the usual gorgeously sexy Michael Mann style-slick, neon digital cinematography, sleek compositions, action set pieces, the editing and score-but it feels pretty toothless. The pacing is lopsided, basically wasting most of the cast, the plot ultimately doesn't amount to much, and as talented as Mann is, even has trouble making people typing on keyboards interesting. Not a terrible film, but unremarkable and largely forgettable. It did so badly financially that I'm surprised the studio is willing to spend on a director's cut.

[Newsnayr]

I thought it was by far one of the best films of last year (#9 on my final list), a great, great film, with what I felt was the best lead actor performance of the year. Some absolutely essential reviews:
http://reverseshot.org/reviews/entry/1989/blackhat" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;
http://www.labuzamovies.com/2015/01/mic ... ckhat.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Roger Ryan]

Two different analyses of the director's cut of Blackhat from Criticwire and The Playlist.