Modern Classics: ‘Blackhat’ and the Cinema of Michael Mann
A jailed hacker is released to help track a global cyberattack that moves from China to the U.S., blurring the line between digital crime and physical violence.
Possibly the most “Michael Mann” film Michael Mann has ever made—almost a greatest-hits compilation—Blackhat (2015) is a ghostly, mysterious visual treatise that uses the thriller as little more than a narrative excuse. What Mann is really doing, once again, is investigating how neon lights bounce off rain-soaked streets at night; how cities look when seen from the sea or from the air (also at night); how bodies brush against each other and glances cross furtively; how a casual bar conversation can turn unbearably tense; and how a run-down neighborhood in some forgotten city can radiate danger and beauty at the same time.
Blackhat is a film you can’t take your eyes off. Everything on screen demands attention—far more than what’s being told. Mann’s ongoing struggle with mainstream success, from Miami Vice onward, may stem from his obsession with moments of stasis: those interstices where the story pauses and the camera drifts, for a few seconds, toward some detail that has caught his eye. More fundamentally, though, the Mann-versus-success conflict lies in his decision to embrace digital as something fundamentally different from traditional cinema. The elegant filmmaker of the ’80s, from Collateral onward, has fully committed to digital—but not as a poor imitation of 35mm. He treats it as a beast with its own strange metabolism, one that requires a very specific diet.
Mann is convinced that digital shouldn’t mimic film, but generate its own aesthetic. His comparisons between cinema and architecture in interviews are key to understanding this idea. The “problem,” of course, is that this aesthetic is miles away from average audience taste, trained to expect the polished, glossy look of mainstream Hollywood genre movies. Mann’s films have grown increasingly rough, messy, even grubby: moments that look like home video, images that seem barely color-corrected, sound mixes that feel unfinished. These choices disorient viewers waiting for tidy, predictable thrillers.
The story Blackhat tells is far less original than its mise en scène and requires a certain suspension of disbelief. Chris “Thor” Hemsworth plays Hawthorne, a super-hacker who happens to be in prison, looks like an Armani model, and reads Foucault and Derrida between sets of abs workouts. This is a classic Mann “cool” archetype—think James Caan, Don Johnson, Tom Cruise, Colin Farrell. Accept that premise early and everything gets easier. When a double cyberattack blows up a reactor in China and sends soybean stocks soaring, a joint American-Chinese task force needs Hawthorne’s help. He strikes a deal: let him out of prison, and if he catches the culprit, he walks free. If not, he goes back.
Hawthorne is a textbook Mann protagonist: a hyper-competent professional, constantly moving from city to city, burdened with secrets and complicated relationships, perpetually hovering at the margins of institutions. He may flirt with authority, but always as an outsider. For much of its runtime—complete with plenty of dialogue in Chinese—Blackhat plays like a Mann-directed Hong Kong genre film: breathless and confusing, with visual choices that ignore the informational clarity demanded by conventional Hollywood thrillers, making room instead for fleeting moments where anything seems possible.
Hawthorne and his team—his Chinese university friend, that friend’s sister (with whom he falls in love in full Miami Vice mode), Viola Davis, and others—must combine old-school fieldwork (car chases, shootouts, street confrontations) with something potentially far less cinematic: sitting in front of computers, cracking code. Mann, however, never lets the film become visually inert. He opens with an animated, almost abstract visualization of how malware infiltrates and destroys a system, then expands outward to his signature spaces: open cities, neon nights, urban landscapes glimpsed from descending airplanes. The camera is constantly moving, privileging texture over information, punctuated by jolts of handheld chaos that feel as if the camera were being operated by one of the characters.
This collision between refinement and dirtiness is pure Mann. His films have always lived on the border between hyperrealism and hyper-stylization, but since Collateral, the former has increasingly overtaken the latter. His recent work feels like a series of grimy nocturnal poems: characters in sharp focus against neon-lit cityscapes, electronic music burrowing under the skin, bass lines thudding directly into the gut. These are stories of solitary men, professionals operating near criminal worlds, searching for redemption and/or the love of a woman who is both beautiful and exotic.
Yes, some dialogue flirts with self-parody, and some actors—Tang Wei, playing Hawthorne’s romantic interest—struggle with English more than necessary. But Blackhat isn’t aiming for classical dramatic plausibility. It exists somewhere between the operatic genre filmmaking of Heat and the near-total abstraction of Miami Vice, where characters become just another element of the composition, no more important than certain locations or shots.
In that sense, Mann is more honest than most action and thriller directors. He knows his story is built from well-worn narrative templates, and that what a director can truly contribute is a way of seeing: an eye for detail, the ability to turn routine material into something beautiful, strange, and singular. That’s what Blackhat ultimately is—a collection of remarkable moments: hallucinatory suspense sequences, ferocious chases, scenes where the camera seems to stumble upon the action by accident, seduced by the distractions of the locations themselves.
The viruses unleashed by hackers are invisible to us. We don’t see them, yet they silently shape our lives through intangible connections. Visually, Blackhat becomes the cinematic expression of that idea, guided by a director who sees what the rest of us can’t—or don’t know how to look for—and finds, within those abstractions, moments of eerie electronic beauty and an unlikely, deeply felt digital poetry.
