It’s been six years since Michael Mann’s last film PUBLIC
ENEMIES (2009), an overly solemn and morose affair that loses any sense of the
sleek elegance and grandeur that Mann’s films are known for, lost in a kind of
dour and depressing looking digital era film blues, where the transition from
35mm celluloid to digital feels overly constricted to the point of suffocating. Think what you will about Mann’s films, they
have always had an overwhelmingly modern look about them where the sheer beauty
of a city landscape has a breathtaking allure.
Mann began exploring the easy maneuverability and lightweight effects of
a digital camera while shooting the boxing sequences in ALI (2001), where there’s
been a steady decline since then in the cleanness of that look which has always
been Mann’s trademark. After a brief
hiatus for whatever reasons (probably lack of funding, like everbody else in
the business), one thing’s for certain, and that is Mann has rediscovered his
ability to use digital cameras to create a lush canvas on the screen. Specifically he turns to “old-school” British
cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh, perhaps not a household word, but his notable
work includes the early Jane Campion films AN ANGEL AT MY TABLE (1990), THE
PIANO (1993), and THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY (1996), all of which look fabulous,
and this film is no different. What
immediately grabs the audience’s interest is the relevance of the material,
high tech security espionage, where you’d think former NSA contractor Edward
Snowden from Citizenfour
(2014) was one of the political consultants.
Mann actually met with Mike Rogers, the Chairman of the Permanent Select Committee
on Intelligence as well as former black
hat hacker Kevin Poulsen, once sentenced to five years in a federal
penitentiary, now senior editor for Wired
News, in an attempt to make the film as authentic as possible, where their
input in researching, writing, and shooting the film is invaluable. But it was the events surrounding a malware
system known as Stuxnet on
Christmas Day, December 25, 2012 that captured Mann’s attention, where a
computer worm targeted an Iranian power plant (the Natanz nuclear facility) and
reportedly ruined nearly one-fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges, perhaps the
most significant advancement of a publicly known intentional act of cyberwarfare. Stuxnet was initially discovered in June 2010
and was designed to attack industrial networks, where it is typically
introduced to the target environment by an infected USB
flash drive.
Initially entitled Cyber,
hacker films are a strange breed, as instead of humans, the featured objects of
the camera’s interest are actually computers, where people are continually seen
sitting in front of them typing in strange globs of technical data, where it’s
hard to find anything particularly dramatic about that, and oftentimes it can
look downright silly. Up until now, the
prototype has probably been SNEAKERS (1992), a relatively playful crime
thriller, and prior to that WARGAMES (1983), which was actually watched at Camp
David on opening weekend by President Ronald Reagan and discussed with members
of Congress, WarGames:
A Look Back at the Film That Turned ... - Wired, filmed at a time when
there were few security measures in place to stop hackers. Mann is more interested in creating a
modernist landscape with a potentially futuristic scenario exploring the darker
ramifications of cyber terrorism, where cyber crime resembles organized crime
and is ruthlessly driven by greed, profit, and a lust for power. From the opening moments, FBI agents are on
high alert once it’s been determined that a sophisticated hacking device
created an explosion at a nuclear power plant in Hong Kong, causing joint
cooperation between high level American and Chinese investigators, where Los
Angeles FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis) is assigned to work with a
Chinese military officer from their cyber crime unit, Captain Chen Dawai
(Wang Leehom) along with his sister Chen Lien (Tang Wei), both from Ang Lee’s
Lust, Caution (Se, jie) (2007). Dawai identifies
the origin of the malware device, as it’s a variation on something he created
along with his roommate in college at MIT, Nicholas Hathaway (Chris Hemsworth),
currently serving a prison term for bank fraud and computer crimes, where like
Hannibal Lecter in THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991), his expertise would be
needed to track down the perpetrators.
Once sprung from jail, he takes a lead role on the case (much to the
chagrin of the FBI), having a mix of roguish criminality and magazine cover
good looks, but he’s light years ahead of the rest when it comes to modern era cyber
crime, even though that’s hardly plausible after serving time in prison for
five years. Due to the accelerated
advances in the computer stratosphere, each year rapidly outdistancing the
previous year’s revelations, previous cyber knowledge would be near obsolete
when it comes to the sophisticated levels of government intelligence security
measures. Nonetheless, this becomes an
elaborate Mission Impossible (1966 –
1973) storyline where Hathaway’s skill sets are impeccable, like a modern era
James Bond, where he’s forced to fend off attackers as easily as navigating his
way through heavily guarded computer networks.
Simultaneous to the power plant attack was a similar hacked
entry into the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, causing the numbers to go through
the roof, where this team has to identify the missing connection. Taking a tour of exotic lands in the Far
East, from Hong Kong to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia, and finally Jakarta,
Indonesia, this is a veritable travelogue into faraway lands, adding a texture
of rich atmosphere throughout, guided by the haunting 80’s sounding synthesizer
score from Atticus Ross. While Harry
Gregson-Williams is listed as a co-composer, the final musical selections
chosen by Mann for the film are almost exclusively written by Ross. One of the clever details Mann gets right is
his less than admirable portrayal of the NSA, who are viewed with
a deep-seeded distrust by actual computer experts from Silicon Valley,
especially after they were secretly spied on and targeted by their own
government. Here they are in possession
of a secret supercomputing service known as Black Widow, capable of analyzing
data faster than anything available to the outside world, but they refuse FBI requests
for assistance, as they are viewed as hidden and entrenched behind a veil of governmental
secrecy and impenetrability, more interested in protecting themselves than in
helping to solve the crimes, even after it’s been established that the nuclear
accident was a dry run for an even larger catastrophe that has mass
international implications. Quite unlike
most thrillers, Mann subverts the stereotypes where the Americans are viewed as
petty, closed-minded incompetents that refuse to see the bigger picture while
actually generating more sympathy to the Chinese. While there is the obligatory romance between
Hathaway and Chen Lien, there is also a flamboyant sweep through picturesque
geographical regions, where much of it plays out like a road movie with
spectacular backdrops. Some of the most
remarkable imagery comes from the prevalent use of modern urban architecture,
where humans often seem small and insignificant by comparison. Nonetheless they are seen racing through
scenes of astonishing beauty, stopping occasionally for shootouts with the bad
guys on the run, even dropping into an underground sewer system in pursuit,
where our team has to crack their computer codes and penetrate their
invisibility in identifying the mastermind behind the operations named Sadak
(Yorick van Wageningen). Two of the
better scenes are in marked contrast, one featuring Chen Lien dressed
fashionably all in white as she devises a devious plan to obtain access to
Sadak’s bank accounts, dressed in splendor like corporate royalty as she enters
the bank pretending to be a featured speaker at an important meeting taking
place, but needs to copy her written presentation which was ruined by a coffee
spill, handing the unsuspecting security guard a USB drive which instantly
breaks into the bank’s computer network.
The other is a beautifully choreographed sequence that takes place
during an annual Balinese Hindu celebration called Nyepi or “Day of
Silence,” where they ask for forgiveness to atone for their sins, becoming a
massive ritual procession of devout worshippers dressed in red flowing saffron
robes. Like a scene out of Zhang Yimou
who thrives on mass spectacle, this is the colorful setting for the final showdown,
much of it taking place against the flow of humanity, where forces of good and
evil are intertwined in search for a restorative balance, with many lives lost,
where the viewer is left in an ambiguous haze of disorientation where only time
will tell if there’s a brighter future on the horizon.
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