Christ alone knows what Michael Mann was thinking when he took on Blackhat. Its a timely, topical concept (hacktivism in global politics) that Mann reduces to the level of a by-the-numbers action movie. Fundamentally, no thriller that relies on key plot points happening on a computer monitor is going to thrill... but at least the technical stuff is on point, right? Urm. Well, a key scene sees the FBI working to obtain a secret program from the NSA called Black Widow. Its apparently able to restore wiped out or corrupted data (which is movie magic, not real life computer wizardry), and theyve tried to obtain it from their sister agency by fair means without success so here comes the foul. The protagonists send a spear phishing email (ie, a message intended to trick the recipient into opening it and thereby downloading malware) to the NSA agent concerned. Despite being specifically trained not to do so, the agent falls for the gambit, allowing our hero to snaffle Black Widow right from under his twitching nose. Lets assume that theres a reason that the agent concerned was so lax: its his birthday, and no one at works remembered, and hes been waiting all day for someone to say something, poor soul. Why is this revolutionary godware stashed there on an online server in the first place? Given that its a miraculous bit of kit that any unscrupulous hacker would kill whole families for, why leave it in the one place thats vulnerable to said unscrupulous hackers? Apparently this was pointed out to Mann in no uncertain terms by his own technical advisors however, the plot point was central to the movie, and Mann simply decided that he couldnt face retooling the script to make it actually work, deciding to try and bluff it past the audience on force of personality alone. Well, that worked out well for you, didnt it?
Professional writer, punk werewolf and nesting place for starfish. Obsessed with squid, spirals and story. I publish short weird fiction online at desincarne.com, and tweet nonsense under the name Jack The Bodiless. You can follow me all you like, just don't touch my stuff.
