Blackhat - A Lesson in Fundamental Storytelling
You know, I don’t get angry at incompetence, not usually. In fact, I take it as an encouragement: If this tripe can make it on the big screen, then my mediocre works should be explosive hits!
But the more I think about it the less pleased I am, because Blackhat isn’t a movie that got almost everything right but botched a few key points. It’s not a movie that needed a couple of more small edits to get it up to snuff. It’s not a movie whose action set-pieces let it down, or one in which the director couldn’t afford solid actors so he accepted what he could get and did the best with it and it simply fell short of his vision.
This is a movie that failed the most fundamental aspect of storytelling, that being characterization. It also failed in the writing of dialogue on almost every level.
Let’s take things one at a time. Oh, and there will be heavy spoilers, so if you intend to watch the movie, well. . . probably don’t, because it’s really not worth the watch. Also, note to self: If I get 10 minutes into a movie in the future and almost decide to turn it off but then don’t? just turn it off next time.
A Director Who Doesn’t Direct
In Jurassic Park, there is almost no scene where someone doesn’t talk over someone, or you can see someone wanting to talk but impatiently allowing someone to finish, or at least visually acting while he’s being spoken to. Usually there are multiple people in any given shot who all appear to be doing something, and at one point there are two conversations occurring simultaneously! It makes every scene feel lived-in, active, busy, engaging. The actors aren’t standing around waiting for their turn to say their lines, these thespians are the characters, and if they’re not directly doing something, you can tell that they’re thinking about doing something.
Oh, you think I’m exaggerating?
A basic conversational sequence to simultaneously characterize, introduce relationships and prepare information for later. Ian takes delight in annoying Hammond. Even as he’s being scolded he’s already turned his attention to Dr. Saddler, who is, along with her presumable beau and the lawyer sitting across from her, also showing his own emotions.
Hammond is frustrated with Ian’s protest, but Ian’s coming at him with knowledge and intensity. Hammond can “tell” that Ian Malcolm is wrong, but he’s not able to easily improvise a counter argument. Nor was he expecting to be defending himself: that’s why he has Grant and Saddler, who are hitherto silent.
The lawyer, now enamored with the idea of the park and the fabulous wealth it will undoubtedly enjoy, looks on in disbelief as Ian Malcolm argues passionately against the whole thing. Even when he’s completely out of focus, he’s still acting. The first to die, but for the time he’s here, he brings the heat.
Robert, the game warden, talks with Grant while Hammond, at a lower volume but completely audible if you’re listening, talks to Saddler, ensuring her that the fences are well-equipped to hold the raptors.
This is directing. This is characterization. This is engaging cinema. Just as each sentence in a novel must be well-written and interesting, so must each shot in a movie. A sentence’s word choice matters; whether it’s a simple or complex sentence matters; its length matters; dialogue tags or no dialogue tags; dialogue or a paraphrase of a conversation; immediate scene or exposition or narrative summary or description: all of these things affect how the reader feels from moment to moment.
So, too, does every shot in a movie, from the positions of the characters, the placement of the camera, the camera movement or lack thereof, how tight or far the shot is, what the characters in frame are doing—these all tell a story. And you can be very efficient with it. You can inform the audience of three different things at once without using up even a single additional second, since you can show multiple things at once.
But alright, maybe it’s not fair to use Jurassic Park, one of the greatest movies of all time by one of the greatest directors of all time, as a comparison. Then again, I could argue against that. Michael Mann is the director, and he has under his belt Heat, Ali, and Collateral, among some 18 other credits, and that’s just for directing, never mind his writing and producing. This is a man who has been doing this for decades, and you’re telling me he still hasn’t developed the simple skill of making characters show personality, and providing stakes to a story? It only took me five years of writing to figure this out, and he’s still floundering in the shallow end of the storytelling pool, for heaven’s sake. There was ample opportunity, too. Don’t these movies have hundreds of people in the crew? I know the director gets the final say, but this is a lot of work to go through only to have the most basic aspect of storytelling almost entirely absent. No one on set said, “Hey, I notice that these characters HAVE NO PERSONALITY.”
”What do you mean?” Mann must have retorted in astonishment. “Remember that one line we gave where Lien indicates she was leading a guy on to get free drinks?”
Which she never does again. She immediately falls in love with the main character and becomes hyper-monogamous with no effort from anyone.
”She just needed to find the right guy!”
Or the right director, I guess.
The movie has no heart because that requires humans, and there are no humans in this movie, only paraphernalia, tools to get us from point A to point B. But then, there were a lot of hints that this would be the case, right from the beginning. I said that 10 minutes in I was ready to turn off the movie, right? Well. . . .
2. Tension and Drama Are Effectively Nonexistent
Oh, it’s there. Technically. But this isn’t a term paper and you’re not getting points for detecting “what he was going for.” Either he did his job and you felt something, or he failed and you didn’t. I, for one, didn’t.
The movie was so competent that I actually kept up a moderate interest the entire time, but upon finishing it I just felt like I’d wasted my time. I shouldn’t feel like I could do better after watching a movie.
So let’s get specific.
Wow, this guy must be one dangerous criminal.
Our introduction to the main character, Nick Hathaway, is him being gently shoved to the floor, delicately handcuffed, and carefully carried down the corridor by four policemen in riot gear. The implication is clear: He’s very dangerous.
O.K., now pretty much forget about that for the next thirty minutes because it doesn’t come into play within that time, nor does anyone mention his dangerous-ness at any point hereafter.
Later, Nick and his friend’s sister are in a restaurant, hoping to catch a glimpse of the criminal that they believe they’ve tricked into showing up. During this time she asks why he was in prison and he explains that he beat the ever-living out of someone. This may seem like it’s some kind of foreshadowing, but nothing is made of it, and you could easily be forgiven for assuming he just had a normal street-fight that got out of hand, or maybe he has anger management issues. Don’t think too hard about it: the director didn’t, either.
Shortly thereafter Nick sees a camera, gets suspicious, and sneaks into a back room where there’s a computer controlling the aforementioned camera, and it’s watching him and the girl, Chen Lien. He has a short conversation with whoever is on the other end, breaks the physical connection to disable the camera, then comes out into the dining room to fetch Chen just in time for three tough customers to enter the restaurant so they can have a conversation using knives as translating devices.
Unfortunately for them, Nick is fluent in the language.
He finishes the fight and leaves.
Now, what did we learn? Well, earlier he was shown being manhandled by multiple guards, suggesting he was tough, although no one ever actually says anything about it. Then he tells Chen about how he beat someone up, but she has no questions and he’s not forthcoming with the braggadocio. Then we see him beat some guys up.
No one ever reacts to this, and no one ever mentions it again. If we know why he’s so martially capable, I don’t recall it ever being mentioned in the story. I’d assume it was his time in prison, but he’d still need to train, and that’s never mentioned. So we have an unassuming hacker who is actually capable of beating up three tough thugs at all at once. He’s clever enough to attack suddenly and viciously, and to use every weapon at his disposal, including shattered beer bottles, wooden chairs and restaurant dining tables.
And that means what?
Well, it means that this is what the movie wants him to do. That’s about it. You don’t care that he can fight because no one else in the movie cares. No one says anything like, “Wow, you just took on three guys at once and somehow won,” or, “Did you learn that in prison?” or, “I think we were this close to dying, I need to sit down somewhere. Are they going to follow us? are they dead? What should we do?”
There is zero emotional fallout or, heck, even curiosity about any of this. It’s just another day at the office. Or uh, another Hollywood movie. Oh, that’s right. Same thing.
3. Character Goals Are Present
And that’s the best I can say about that.
We have multiple elements set up, but none of them pay off. The only one whose goal is clear is Chen Dawai’s: He’s a government agent who wants to solve the hacking case because that’s his job. He also had a minor ulterior motive of getting his old pal Nick out of prison, but if you think that has any bearing on anything then you must have skimmed the review up to this point. The pair have a prolonged hug when Nick first walks out of the prison gate, but that’s the closest they seem to be. Sure, they feel comfortable around each other, and there are a couple nods throughout the movie—for instance, when they have a brief discussion about Nick getting cozy with Dawai’s sister—but these are all just. . . ideas. Concepts. Setups. Nothing ever actually happens, things are just alluded to, or introduced, or referenced, and then nothing.
Example from the scene I just talked about. Nick gets freaky with Dawai’s hot sister, they’re apparently becoming a couple. Dawai walks in on them laying together, they share a look but the plot is looming so there’s no time to yell at each other just yet.
“Oh, uh, she was just. . . really cold.”
A few minutes later they’re on a helicopter with their earmuff-cum-headsets on and Nick holds up four fingers, indicating they should switch to channel four to have a private conversation over their headsets.
“So, uh, your sister has some kind of susceptibility to being very cold, huh? Pretty crazy, pretty crazy.”
They proceed to have a halfway decent conversation where they’re both reasonable. It amounts to, “If this all goes belly-up then you’ll go back to prison, and where does that leave my sister now that she’s got feelings for you and your love has been consummated?”
The scene ends on a shot of Nick’s expression, which is appropriately conflicted.
“Who will she snuggle with to stay warm if I go to prison?”
O.K., now disregard this moment because it never comes back and is never discussed again. In the third act, Nick is now on the run and he and Dawai, amidst planning Nick’s escape, both tell Lien that she can’t go with Nick because that would be insane and a waste of her life, hiding out forever. She’s suitably annoyed at being ordered around, but Nick makes it clear that it’s his life and his decision on whether he lets her join him.
But this isn’t really defined in any way. There’s nothing about it that makes you think, “Wow, he’s realizing that he’s no good for her.”
They set up this moment with the previous helicopter conversation, and this should be the resolution to that. Nick should be saying, y’know, he’s right. It was one thing to go to prison, but being on the run forever? What kind of life is that for her? I can’t do that to her, or her brother. I need to not be selfish.
But the movie doesn’t suggest any of that. You just have to make it up yourself, and if I’m going to be writing the movie then I want a bigger cut of the profits.
A few minutes later Nick expresses to her that he’s a fugitive and will be on the run and all that good stuff.
“You never take me with you when you’re on the lam.”
The last thing he says is, “Would I take you with me where I’m going?”
I don’t know what this means, but anyway, the car behind them blows up and the story’s off and we never really find out if he would, or what she would have said to this, or how her brother would have felt about it, but he’s dead now.
Speaking of which, now Nick has a choice to make: Try to take revenge against the bad guy we’ve been going after this whole movie, or take Lien far away with him where they can try to live a normal life.
It’s a dilemma. Even Lien might want to go the vengeance route, might wish death upon her enemy, and Nick is the tool she could use to accomplish that. . . at the risk of Nick’s life. If he died, would she be able to live with herself and the decision to use him?
If Nick died, his only solace would be the death, and if he were crippled then even death would not be a refuge. But should they run instead, go into hiding, could the two of them live knowing that they allowed Dawai’s killer to escape when they had the means to not only exact their vengeance but to stop the enemy’s plans that would cause great pain to a great many people? This is the kind of emotional intensity that you respect movies like this for having.
Lol, just kidding, none of that happens. The movie just takes it for granted that you, the dumb viewer, have no feelings about any of this and just want the plot to move on, so it moves on. There is one scene that shows Lien grieving, then Nick goes to risk his and Lien’s lives without a single instant of consideration for what it could mean for her, not because Nick is a bad person, or thoughtless, but because it never came up. Not to the characters, and not to the writers of the movie.
Or maybe that bit’s a sliver of film on the cutting room floor.
4. I Could Go On Like This for Thousands of Words
Dawai and Nick’s relationship is basically nonexistent. There is rarely any dialogue that is not strictly plot-forwarding, which means there is no real personalities to any of these characters other than the most superficial: The black lady is aggressive when necessary, but equally reasonable when the situation calls for it; Dawai is a company man, shrewd, but willing to think outside the box both for the success of the mission and for personal gain if it doesn’t compromise his goals to his country; Lien is a cute, smart girl who beds men on first dates and if she’s not bedding them she’s casting them flirty grins for free margaritas, but she also cares about people probably and has a nurturing nature, which I assume based on a single conversation she has with Nick.
But these are just foundational. We barely see enough information to make these inferences. These basic character elements are suggested, and then that’s it.
Let’s go back to Jurassic Park. No, we don’t know everything about Alan Grant or John Hammond. We don’t know the deepest aspects of their personalities, but we see Alan Grant going from being annoyed by children to being forced to take care of them and then quickly adapting to the role of a father. He gets told a joke, he tells white lies to make the kids feel better, he risks his life for them and he makes light of situations to keep their spirits up. He’s thoughtful and he shows himself to be thoughtful in how he talks about his opinion on the park toward the beginning of the movie and when the kids later ask him what he’ll do if he doesn’t need to dig up fossils anymore.
Ian Malcolm makes jokes constantly, is a womanizer, is smart and cautious when it comes to “the big picture” while being loosey-goosey with his own relationships. We see him constantly making quips and flirting and then, later, we see him making quick decisions and pushing everyone in the right direction. He acts silly but in a pinch he’s reliable, even leading the T-rex away from Grant and the kids, a decision that gets him badly wounded. Later he helps Saddler through the building that has the breaker apparatus.
The point is that what we know of the characters is oftentimes developed beyond what is even strictly needed for the movie. The characters are in a dangerous situation that almost wouldn’t call for any characterization. People are too busy trying not to get eaten to show off a lot of their personalities, yet we still get plenty of it.
Everything that’s set up gets a payoff. Every character flaw or strength introduced is meaningful.
In Blackhat? There’s a dozen setups and no payoffs. I forgot at some point what the character’s motivation even was, why he was doing what he was doing. Big decisions were given ten seconds of tense consideration and then enacted without any dialogue or expression of purpose.
It’s a chessboard set up immaculately with glasses of brandy on the table beside, but the game is being played by chimps. They might move the pieces around and drink the liquor, but do they even know how to play, and can they appreciate the flavor of the drinks? Do we care?
I don’t.
