BLACKHAT B
USA (133 mi) 2015
‘Scope d: Michael Mann
Official
site
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.
Director Laura Poitras
CITIZENFOUR B+
This is as much a glimpse into the future as anything you’re
likely to see at the movies, where honestly, this will play just as well on a
laptop or any sized computer screen as a theater experience, as what we’re
dealing with here is coded in such technical terminology. Perhaps this is the 21st version of Coppola’s The
Conversation (1974), only with more chilling implications. While the whole concept of Windows computer
technology was supposedly to open doors and avenues into new terrain that was
previously unavailable and off limits, creating a multitude of endless
possibilities where curiosity would only be rewarded, the idea of looking out
into open cyberspace also allows other unnamed entities, otherwise known as
governments, to look in at you, since the computer is the device that keeps us
all connected. It’s a hard to conceive
idea, but this is a film that specializes in the latest, most sophisticated
surveillance techniques ever devised by humankind, where this window into each
person’s personal identity and information is just like wiretapping every
citizen without a warrant. Perhaps the
strangest piece of sci-fi in this film is the extent to which these individuals
protect their secrecy, where literally any and all electronic gadgetry can be
used as an eavesdropping device, where rarely has paranoia been elevated to
this level of counter sophistication in order to prevent detection. The third film in a post 9/11 Trilogy,
following MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY (2006), about life for Iraqis under American
occupation, which follows a Sunni Arab doctor as he prepares to run for the
early 2005 elections in Iraq, a film that got the director placed on watch
lists at airports when entering the country, where she has been stopped and
detained regularly ever since, but was also nominated for an Academy Award for
Best Documentary, also THE OATH (2010), which documents the legal ramifications
of an Iraqi detained at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp as an
enemy combatant, the first to be tried by U.S. military tribunals, eventually transferred
to Yemen, as the case was appealed to the Supreme Court which ruled the
military charges that led to his arrest were not war crimes by international
law at the time he committed them, making the detention and subsequent
prosecution unconstitutional.
What do we know about this filmmaker? She
comes from a wealthy background, where her parents donated $20 million dollars
in 2007 to found The Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research at the McGovern Institute for Brain
Research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, while being raised
at an experimental private school in Massachusetts, the Sudbury Valley School. While she planned to be a chef, spending
several apprentice years at a French restaurant in Boston, she changed her
mind, moving across the coutry to the San Francisco Art Institute, where she
studied with experimental filmmaker Ernie Gehr, eventually moving back to New York
where in 1996 she graduated from The
New School in Greenwich Village.
Bearing the distinction of being a 2012 MacArthur Fellow which partially
funded her work on this film, she is part of a new social movement rising out
of the ashes of a dying newspaper business that challenges conventional
language of media, which limits the idea of personal freedom of expression, as
the communications industry itself has become a protected corporate interest
that sets its own standards of acceptability that are rarely challenged. For instance, in the use of drone “signature
strikes,” conventional media through international wire services have settled upon
the supposedly acceptable terminology of “targeted
killings” as opposed to calling the actions “assassinations,” a term most
all newspapers would simply not print. However,
Journalist Glenn Greenwald in Salon articles
as early as America's
drone sickness - Salon.com, April 19, 2012, suggest drone attacks kill far
more civilians than reported, as the government maintains a policy of secrecy,
suggesting assassination is a more apt term for what’s going on, further
elaborated upon by Erik Wemple from The
Washington Post, February 10, 2014, "Glenn
Greenwald and the U.S. 'assassination' program, where Greenwald’s
explanation is “the accurate term rather than the euphemistic term that the
government wants us to use…I’d say anyone who is murdered deliberately away
from a battlefield for political purposes is being assassinated.” The broadened position used by governments is
that the battlefield in the War on Terrorism exists everywhere, where this
expanded definition intrudes upon the lives of literally everyone. Enter Edward Snowden.
In January 2013, filmmaker Laura Poitras was still in the
process of developing a final chapter in her film trilogy about abuses of
national security in post-9/11 America when she started receiving encrypted
emails from someone identifying himself as “citizen four,” who was ready to
blow the whistle on the massive covert surveillance programs run by the NSA and
other intelligence agencies. Apparantly
motivated by the stream of lies and denials from upper echelon military brass
and intelligence officials to various congressional inquiries asking about the
extent of the government’s reach into the private lives of ordinary citizens,
extending the reach of the USA
PATRIOT Act, implemented immediately after the devastating effects of 9/11,
designed to prevent terrorists from striking again on American soil. However, Poitras began receiving highly
detailed yet secretive information that would implicate the White House, the
NSA, tech companies, and a variety of other American institutions in a
broadranging initiative of illegal wiretaps, computer access and listening
devices to spy on every American citizen as well as government officials abroad
without any of them ever knowing of it.
While the Act itself requires judicial overview, where wiretaps and
various other surveillance methods require court approval, this rapidly
developing surveillance phenomena was already having a massive impact on the
rights of privacy while taking place without any apparent oversight or
accountability. This not only captured
the attention of the filmmaker, but the whistleblower, who turned out to be
Edward Snowden, a 29-year old NSA contractor who demanded utter secrecy in all
subsequent contacts, eventually meeting six months later in a hotel room in
Hong Kong, along with two journalists working for The Guardian, Glenn Greenwald and Ewen MacAskill. Meeting him for the first time with the
cameras rolling is a tense moment where no one really knows what to expect, but
it becomes one of the historical and perhaps defining events in our
lifetimes. It turns out Greenwald was
initially sent encrypted emails some months earlier, but he dismissed them as
junk mail, so the contact established with the filmmaker allows us a window
into this moment, along with audiences for generations to come.
What’s immediately fascinating, once Snowden starts engaging
the journalists, is the extraordinary level of caution, meticulous detail, and
intelligence, where the mindful nature of protecting themselves from anyone who
might be listening in on them is just stunning, elevating the level of paranoia
not seen since those tense atmospheric thrillers of the 70’s, like The
Parallax View (1974), The
Conversation (1974), CHINATOWN (1974), THREE DAYS OF THE
CONDOR (1975), and ALL THE PRESIDENT’S MEN (1976), yet this is real life
unfolding before our eyes. All of this
lends a certain theatricality to the geeky and overly technical nature of much
of the material Snowden intends to make public.
Poitras seems to realize this and maintains her focus more on the man
than the nature of his revelations, allowing the journalists to do their jobs
(where The Guardian was subsequently awarded
a Pulitzer Prize in public service), which by the time viewers see the film will
have already been thoroughly debated and analyzed in public and speak for
themselves. What’s curious about what
the audience sees is that none of this is actually known yet, but is about to
unfold in the upcoming days and weeks ahead.
Condensing material gathered over the course of eight days, we learn
that Snowden is highly articulate and displays a natural brilliance, where his
ease with his own conscience suggests unassailable convictions, which will
certainly be challenged in the upcoming days and years ahead. While Snowden never intended to become the
focus, preferring instead to remain on the sidelines, it’s interesting to see
his reaction once the secret revelations are exposed, where suddenly a
construction crew has mysteriously moved around his home, his family and
friends are questioned, and the government is awkwardly caught offguard, searching
for answers, eventually introducing a smear campaign against him, where he is
subsequently charged as a “traitor” for violating the Espionage
Act that was passed after America’s entrance into World War I. The film doesn’t enter the discussion of
whether Snowden is a hero, a whistleblower, a dissident, a patriot, or a
traitor, all labels that have been attributed to him, but it’s certainly ironic
that those artists and journalists that effectively conspired with him to help
expose these public revelations have all been lauded and acclaimed. Greenwald has separated from The Guardian, and joined forces with
Poitras, fellow journalist Jeremy Scahill and others to form an independent
news website called The Intercept, where they’ve delved further into the
ramifications of Snowden’s documentation, which includes the fact that 1.2
million people are currently on Homeland Security’s watch list, reminiscent of
similar tactics practiced by J. Edgar Hoover during his tenure with the
FBI. The government’s hardball tactics
used against Snowden have also been applied to journalists and their families
as well as the filmmaker in the room, where they or their loved ones are
routinely stopped and interrogated at length at airports, practices so
intrusive that Poitras now lives in Berlin while Greenwald had already chosen
to reside in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.
