Blackhat features Thor lead star and current PEOPLE Magazine's Sexiest Man Alive Chris Hemsworth.
In the film, he plays the character of a convict turned government's pick to find and capture a cyber criminal. Hemsworth, whose known as Nicholas Hathaway in the movie, scoured through places such as Los Angeles, Chicago, Jakarta and Hong Kong in a race against time, working closely with American and Chinese agencies to save the international banking network from cyber attack.
Credits on the movie script go to Morgan Davis Foehl who said that the inspiration came from a malware attack on Iran's Natanz uranium enrichment plant, which was deployed through USB flash drives.
In the film's opening part, it shows a Hong Kong nuclear power plant exploding, which prompted Chinese officials to call Chen Dawai (Weng Leehom). The man up for the job is none other than imprisoned hacker Nicholas Hathaway.
Soon, Chen and Hathaway are joined by other team members, such as FBI agent Carol Barrett (Viola Davis), U.S. Marshal Mark Jessup (Hold McCallany) and Lien (Tang Wei), Chen's sister, in a global quest to find the criminal mastermind.
Movie critics gave Blackhat mixed reviews. Some even expressed that they wanted to see the movie only because it was directed by Michael Mann. Mann is known for major films such as The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001) and Collateral (2004).
Here is what major critics and even former hackers are saying about the movie.
Peter Travers of Rolling Stone: "The urgent, provoking Blackhat is art imitating the perils of cyber-life, and Mann is just the groundbreaking artist to do it."
Joe Neumaier of Daily News: "The movie, about good guys chasing a cybercriminal, ought to have more to it. Instead, the movie's smart ideas are overlaid with dull, standard-issue moments of people typing on computers or pursuits through crowded streets."
Manohla Dargis of NYTimes: "The contrast between the richness of the action and the thinness of the images is just one of many dualities that runs through the movie, as when Mr. Mann cuts from a fanlike image spreading across a screen to a huge flame shooting out from under a Hong Kong cook's wok. Time and again, he puts computer and other spaces into play visually, mapping a brave new world with images of kaleidoscopically pulsing screens and the jewel-like glittering of nighttime megacities."
Kevin Poulsen, former hacker who is now a writer and Wired editor: "He (director Michael Mann) did this great CGI at the beginning of the film. It had nothing to do with that, but that turned out really good. When I learned that he planned on trying to visualize a computer intrusion with graphics, I immediately thought of all these other movies where that's been done just horribly, and I voiced that concern and he wound up having this very specific plan to make it this very physical look. And I think he actually got the EDA file for an actual chipset and motherboard and put that right into the CGI, so it's actually very authentic."
