Directed by Michael Mann
DCP at BAM (2/10/16)
After the premiere of Michael Mann's revised cut of Blackhat on Wednesday night, I braved the brazen cold and went to my bodgea to get a chicken-bacon-swiss sandwich. Soon thereafter, as I laid in bed struggling to digest fried chicken and bacon, my mind, much like my stomach, churned restlessly. Blackhat isn't unlike my sandwich in its artifice and ostensible lack of substance, and in how it sat heavy in my stomach long after I thought I'd finished it. The director's cut of Blackhat, like my sandwich, is wonderful, decadent, disgusting, more substantial than anyone is willing to admit, and satisfying in a way that might repulse those whose brows are too high. When I woke up this morning, I could still feel the sandwich having its way with my stomach, and I could still feel Blackhat lingering in the back of my mind.
Sorry, that was a really weird extended metaphor. I'm done now.
The plot of Blackhat, which doesn't really matter, concerns a terrorist who blows up stuff and messes with the stock market so he can make money. He has a great big bushy beard and an Australian accent and at one point he says, "I don't know myself," which is apt, since we also don't know him, nor do we care about him. He's a fleshy MacGuffin, spurring Chris Hemsworth's beefy computer hacker and his diverse (hey, diversity!) cohort on a globetrotting adventure. (I sorta wish William Peterson had been cast to play the bad guy; he's good at not acting, and the role requires zero acting.) The movie is often silly and occasionally stupid, but it's smart at being silly and stupid. The research that went into a movie predominantly concerned with sexy actors shooting guns is hilarious, since none of the allegedly accurate descriptions and depictions of computer stuff really affects one's enjoyment of Blackhat. The movie, like Chris Hemsworth's smooth pecs, is meaty escapism. Mann unrepentantly forgoes characters and emotion in favor of method, extrapolating profundity from procedure and likening binary numbers to bullets.
The theatrical cut begins with a shot from space, implying some encroaching disaster of a cosmic scale. Then a reactor blows up, which makes the subsequent stock market manipulation feel kinda lame. (With all due respect to soy farmers, the exportation of soy isn't as exciting as nuclear reactors exploding.) The new cut opens with unnerving shots of a desolate stock market, red and green and yellow numbers and letters glowing against black boards. The camera saunters around, the millions of pixels on the screen not unlike the millions of people whose lives are unknowingly controlled by the price of soy. Mann insinuates that soy, which is essentially the basic element whose price controls the price of everything else (soy is the most widely-used food for animals), is consequently the basic element that controls our lives. As silly as Blackhat is (and it is very silly), its ideas are undeniably upsetting.
The explosion comes much later now, which makes dramatic sense. By altering the architecture of the narrative, Mann has turned Blackhat into a more classical (though not traditional) thriller. I've heard a lot of people complain that Blackhat isn't an ambitious effort from Mann -- it's 135 minutes of digi-pulp and beefcake and blood. This is, of course, bullshit: Whereas his contemporaries (Scorsese, Spielberg) are working with inflated budgets and escalating ambitions, orchestrating Oscar-apt epics, 71-year-old Michael Mann made an ultra-violent cyber-thriller starring Chris Hemsworth. Making an unapologetic Michael Mann movie after the middling critical responses that greeted his last two films (both of which are great, if esoteric) is plenty ambitious. Mann, like his unemotional characters, is smart enough to keep doing what he does best.
The movie (being a moving picture comprising pixels instead of grain, it is not, as J. Hobs would say, a "film") is as ugly as it is beautiful. Mann weaves electronic music and wavering, blurry shots into a digital quilt. He pays assiduous attention to details, especially in the film's sparse but extreme moments of violence: He amplifies the sound of a knife repeatedly entering and exiting a man's chest so that it overpowers the thrumming, pulsating score; when guns fire, the muzzle flash burns geometric shapes into the screen; when bullets hit concrete or metal, they leave holes the size of fists; when they hit people, they tear through flesh and throw bodies backwards effortlessly. Since he doesn't seem to care about creating complex characters, he casts every role (save for Hemsworth, though maybe even Hemsworth) exquisitely. Moviegoers wil lcare about Viola Davis simply because she's Viola Davis. If something happens to her, say, she gets gunned down in the street and the camera lingers on her eyes as her final breath dissipates, it will devastate viewers. And no sensible viewer wil ltry to argue that Holt McCallany (the guy who starts the "His Name Was Robert Paulson" chant in Fight Club) is a particularly profound actor, but he seems tailor-made for the role of a U.S. Marshal who's really good at shooting people. Their deaths (as well as that car explosion), which occur in one of my favorite scenes from 2015, aren't glamorous. Even George Miller shot the cornucopia of carnage in Mad Max: Fury Road with operatic grandeur. Mann captures the brutality of murder, which is, weirdly enough, not that easy. He shoots the sex scenes like existential music videos and never apologizes for his long shots of vehicles moving through the night, people staring off into the void, but no one can accuse him of making violence look pretty in Blackhat.
This is such an aesthetic-centric endeavor, Mann might as well have taken the plot out back and put a bullet in its head. The refined score, which features Atticus Ross and the phenomenal Haxan Cloak, begins as a traditional pounding action film score, all percussion and sweat, before reverb-steeped notes with backwards echo start drifting by. As with Miami Vice or Thief, the music is more akin to an aural collage than a normal score. It feels, as Viola Davis might muse, tangible.
No comments:
Post a Comment