Mann has a way of capturing bodies interacting with the space around them that's only as extraordinary as his ability to capture nightscapes. A film of broken communication and broken data, Blackhat is an exercise in pure form, with Mann concerned by the emotional effect of images, and a disregard for narrative logic and plausibility in favour of tech/digital beauty. His most experimental film, and one of 2015's best
Macro fuels micro, and vice versa, in Michael Mann’s world. He crafts scenes of intimacy as well as violence, an attention to gestures, whether it’s how Tang Wei keeps toying with her hair or the veins in her neck, or the posture of a man in a firefight, he’s keen on how bodies move. And he’s determined to show how their actions, sometimes marrying love to murder, usually in a climactic firefight scored by synths, reflect the world they live in. Hathaway is sprung from prison to track the code to its author, a generic detective plot fraught and complicated not just by his role as a con (and later fugitive) but also by the nature of how his expertise preys on the systems of the world. A small (though buff) man in the scope and size of the planet can cross any border he wants from the seat of his chair: he can get into the NSA (!), he can rob banks, he can trace a pattern in targets’ movements across a metropolis, he can talk to the Ukraine (or is it?) from Los Angeles. His reach is longer than his arms, though in the end that’s all he has to use.
