Fighting hackers with hackers

For Mann, the writer, director and producer best known for films like Heat, The Insider, Ali and The Last of the Mohicans, Blackhat posed challenges unlike anything he’d ever tackled, including how to depict the tedium of coding in dramatic fashion. But at 71, with four Oscar nominations and much critical adulation to his credit, Mann remains undimmed.

With Blackhat, he even attended Comic Con for the first time. The idea for the film was inspired by Stuxnet, the computer worm that was identified in 2010 after it had struck an Iranian nuclear facility. Blackhat, the term for a vicious hacker (“white hat” is a good guy), starts with a malware attack on a Chinese nuclear reactor.

Wang plays the MIT-trained Chinese military official tasked with finding the culprit; Hemsworth plays his old programming-whiz college roommate, now incarcerated, whose prison sentence is commuted in exchange for helping solve the puzzle. This being a Michael Mann movie, that means using fists as well as keyboards. Car chases, too.

The movie starts with a nearly five-minute dramatisation of code speeding through a network, shooting lights and grids, and a reverse internal shot of a keystroke. Mann wanted to make it as true as possible; he got a 3D computer model from Qualcomm, the semiconductor maker, to help visualise it. “So the geography is real,” he said. “I didn’t want to do motorcycles on a 3D grid like Tron.”

Capturing the flow of data has bedeviled every filmmaker who’s ever made a movie about programming, said Steve F Anderson, a film professor at the University of Southern California who studies depictions of technology on screen. “3D fly-throughs, psychedelic explosions of 1’s and 0’s, an array of monitors and techno music” are all part of what Anderson calls “Hollywood technological-anxiety films”.

Although Mann was eager to make an of-the-moment movie, hacker films typically don’t age well, Anderson said. Asked if he made the film as an entree into the lucrative Asian market, he said no. “I don’t think of the audience; I just think of what’s interesting to me,” he said. His creative blueprint, he added, is “absolutely intuitive and visceral.”

“The way in is usually through the amygdala,” he said, “not the cerebral cortex.”