kdws3
When i saw this movie for the first time i didn't understand it... the movie seemed surprisingly realistic at times especialy the shooting scenes and other times as it is said in the movie at some point "overwritten"
Well now after few yeas i see it as a masterpiece! there is no way Michael Mann can slip... you may think so because he really wants to keep his idiocracies which is part of the artistic expression.
Everithing in this movie is well calibrated, the lightning, camera angles, he communicates trough every color and sound, i can see Mann's spirit in every scene :) which is a sign of a true story teller! and Hemsworth did a fantastic job expressing Mann's point of view.
Sparse
Well, it was either this or Crazy Stupid Love. A bizarre false dilemma to self-impose, I know, but those are the options I gave myself as alternatives to doing something productive. Unfortunately I started taking notes, so many that I might as well write a full review (or more of a"non-review" really, since I kind of stopped caring early on, and hence will take a more casual approach).Blackhat is a 2015 film directed by Michael Mann, and like most people with most movies (whether they know it or not), I essentially made up my mind about the movie within the first fifteen minutes or so. The movie pretty much stuck to my expectations from there: it's pretty average and unambitious overall, but competent enough. I mean sure, I was pretty bored while watching it, but technically speaking I don't think it's terrible. Had I paid more attention instead of writing this review and practicing piano in between, perhaps I'd find more to gripe about. But really I'm not particularly upset about any of it. The cast is more or less promising, with Viola Davis by far being the highlight for me. Even with the little she's given to do here she's got a great screen presence (as can be expected from her). We also get an off-and-on mumblecore Chris Hemsworth, who hasn't quite nailed his American accent but isn't too awkward to tolerate. Leehom Wang is good for the most part, I'd say, though he's got some shaky moments, particularly regarding some haphazard ADR. To elaborate on that...This movie has some genuinely terrible ADR. It's particularly noticeable during a dialogue scene between Leehom Wang and Wei Tang's characters at the beginning, where it's edited to show as little of their mouths as possible (they do this throughout the movie, actually). It only takes a quick glimpse of someone speaking to hear the audio take a complete detour from the mouth. It's kind of embarrassing. Furthermore, this particular scene at the beginning has the characters speaking awkward, phonetically artificial English when they clearly didn't need to. They could have more naturally and fluently just have spoken Mandarin, and then have applied subtitles (if you oh-so daringly assume your audience has the capacity to read, anyway). Even if speaking English in an Eastern setting was imperative to properly pander to Western audiences, it might have been a good idea to cast actors who were more fluent in English in the first place. Wei Tang in particular sounds like she's struggling with her lines throughout the movie, and it's frankly distracting.Besides the handling of the ADR (which is a nitpick, to be fair), the directing is competent, if still nothing special for the most part. There are some exceptions, such as the satisfyingly stylized computer visualizations at the beginning, and the frequent inclusion of atmospheric shots (even if they could be wholly removed with little consequence to the final product). Otherwise, Mann composes coherent sequences and blocks scenes well-enough, which I suppose is the minimum expectation. There was of course plenty of room for ambition. For instance, imagine if they showed the hands while coding (it is about hackers after all), putting the trajectory of the fingers on full display instead of leaving the hands off-screen. This, it occured to me, would be a small but particularly difficult detail to execute. It's not something I'd have seen before, and would contribute some technical merit to the production. They didn't do it of course, so I don't suppose we'll be seeing actors boast words-per-minute statistics on resumés in the near-future.From what I know the screenplay is based more or less on real events/circumstances. Though I don't know the specifics of the actual situation, the script still manages to leave the impression that it was "Hollywoodized". Though I didn't find this to be a particularly painful attribute (at least not as painful as other instances I've seen), I think it's part of what gives this film kind of disposable feel. Even so, it's still beyond me how people can fire so many bullets and still miss their target entirely (perhaps that even works as a metaphor for the movie as a whole). The romance felt a tad forced, and I can't imagine that white man hooking up with an Asian woman sit well in the Chinese market, or at least from the impressions I've accumulated. The pacing was generally fine despite being a tad overlong, and they could have easily trimmed the romance with the bonus of extra international marketability. The music is functional. Some of the electronic elements sounded cool I guess, and it sets an atmosphere. I'm a big fan of film music sometimes, though this score is neither special enough to praise or bland enough to get upset about. It worked in-context, and I suppose that's all it really needed to do.I've always considered the word "boring" as more of a non-critique, since it typically has more to say about one's attention span and interests than the movie itself (so I'm not going to hold it against the movie too harshly). Blackhat isn't completely unengaging, but it's not exactly engaging either. I wouldn't have felt the need to preoccupy myself by taking notes if it was. Taking notes isn't inherently a bad thing (it can be a great thing, too), but if I'm doing it to keep myself interested in something--anything at all!--then I suppose something's not working. Seeing as how most reviews are compelled to be written under the circumstance that one feels strongly about a movie, whether positive, negative or mixed, it's kind of odd that I wrote one for this. I suppose I'm writing for the sake of writing, then. I'd recommend it if you've got time to kill or need some background noise, but I'm pretty indifferent overall. Score: 6/10? Ah jeez I don't know, who cares?!
anelorgalor
The plot was good and interesting, the actors been well cast and performed good. The directing was for the first part of the movie good but got clumsy in the end. The only action scene that was good, was the brawl in the restaurant, all others been dreadful, unrealistic and brain dead.
