It’s Been 10 Years Since Michael Mann Laid Bare Our Technocratic Future
Blackhat was years ahead of its time.
Blackhat’s release on Jan. 16, 2015, would not ordinarily be something to celebrate. The version of Michael Mann’s ultra-modern cybercrime thriller that made it to theaters was truncated and overtweaked (by Mann himself), dumped unceremoniously by Legendary Entertainment, and subsequently lost $90 million. This is a greater sum than the hacker villain Sadak (Yorick van Wageningen) fraudulently gains from inflated soy shares in the opening act, but it’s fitting that Blackhat depicts financial chaos with a more esoteric, impersonal urgency than you would find in box office reporting from 10 years ago.
Blackhat received limited but sincere praise in 2015, and the breadth of its critical reappraisal was connected to the gradual emergence of Mann’s director’s cut. It first premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2016, then on FX in 2017, followed by a brief appearance on streaming — finally becoming available to buy on Arrow Video’s 4K release of the film in late 2023. The director’s cut, which reorders its plot and refines the film’s visual style, was welcomed by the time of its commercial release as the definitive version of the film’s singular, exhilarating insight into the vulnerabilities of our technocratic systems.
A decade on, Blackhat has aged like wine, a thrilling and unnerving vision of complex digital apparatus that can alter how we think and feel about the world around us.
Nick Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth) possesses a hacker hyperliteracy that negotiates him a commuted prison sentence, if he helps catch the hacker posing a fiscal and existential risk to the technological world. When Nick sees his enemy’s code, he’s compelled: The villain used a remote access tool (RAT) that he wrote with his former college roommate, now-PLA-Capt. Chen Dawai (Leehom Wang). The rest of the hacker’s code is messy, incomplete, hinting at a more complex and destructive plan yet to be unveiled.
Mann’s affinity for lightweight digital photography had been growing since Collateral, a hitman-chauffeur thriller that basked in the passing streetlights of a long night in Los Angeles. Throughout Miami Vice and Public Enemies, Mann’s camerawork grew more agile, with his compositions threading the line between invasive and intimate to evoke a sharp, modern feel. Blackhat is the perfect marriage of style and material — an aggressive but minimalist thriller about society’s inextricable and dubious ties to technology, packed with propulsive and sensual physicality.
Hathaway has spent his prison time training his mind along with his body, making him the most jacked hacker who ever lived — too implausible for critics on first release. Hathaway’s program of uniformity and discipline feels eerily in step with today’s grindset culture, albeit with more philosophy texts on his bookshelf. He towers over his U.S. and Chinese colleagues and dispatches Sadak’s mercenaries with a lethal efficiency like he’s puncturing firewalls and deleting software bugs.
Blackhat is a hacking film that’s always on the move, a globe-trotting thriller concerned with deciphering patterns and motives hiding beneath the surface of modern urban life. The romance that Hathaway shares with Lien (Tang Wei), Dawai’s network engineer sister, plays out in signals and intuition, their passion plain to see on fixed expressions and sudden rushes of desire. Always looming is the threat of decoherence, that systems and bodies will be exposed to hijackers of powerful technology who hold its logic and influence hostage, just out of our reach.
Blackhat may be considered a minor film in Michael Mann’s catalogue, but a decade after its release, it is more powerful than ever.
There are gunfights, assassinations, and hand-to-hand combat, but every bout of action is like an extension of the deep-rooted digital conspiracy that conditions every decision and movement — Hathaway and Sadak are like two programs of cause and effect trying to flush each other out. This is not a world where the threat of chases, brawls, and duels have an advantage over digital tools — instead, all physical exertions can be traced back to impersonal command prompts.
Mann maps out physical spaces with keen interest: Hathaway sticks out like a sore thumb in the urban crowds of Hong Kong and Jakarta, but he never appears fazed, like he’s attempting a type of urban invisibility that goes deeper than being recognized on the street. Columns of concrete appear in multiple action sequences, blending into the background as if these man-made materials were natural growths of an older, outdated society — prehistoric tower servers now past their usefulness. Even when Mann uses cyberthriller visual shorthand — extended shots of light traveling between microchips and circuit boards deep inside a computer — the sharp contrast of this high-speed computer communication to the rest of the film lends it an authority that our characters always have to catch up to.
Blackhat has been praised for its cybersecurity accuracy: In most instances, hackers will try to trick people into giving up access they should be guarding. This distrust of everyone else’s digital prowess informs Hathaway’s final confrontation with Sadak. During a Hindu procession, Hathaway goes fully offline because he has exhausted every other option, with colorful religious dress and flaming torches passing him like a network of computer signals. Digital immersion has taught a new language, and the fact that he can read people, places, and power in such fine detail means he will always be out of sync with it. Ever the romantic, Mann’s digital nomad has a companion to prop up his wounded frame — Hathaway and Lien’s survival depends on each other’s love, an equal share of their united anonymity in a vulnerable world.
