Michael Mann has spent most of his career––from Thief to Last Of The Mohicans to Heat to Public Enemies––making movies about best-in-their-field professionals facing down their own coming obsolescence. His latest, Blackhat, seems to find Mann preserving that theme while pushing it a generation forward with a story about a blackhat hacker (Chris Hemsworth, for some reason) who gets sprung from prison by the feds to help catch an even more skilled cyber criminal.
Mann was one of Hollywood’s earliest digital adopters, and his work has long evidenced a fascination with surveillance and technological change (most notably in Public Enemies), which makes the choice of subject matter seem like a no-brainer. In fact, Blackhat’s first trailer is full of Mann standbys: private jets, speedboats, skyscrapers, John Ortiz, nighttime cityscapes reflecting across rippling water, urban shootouts with military-grade weapons, shots framed through windshields.
Blackhat is scheduled to hit theaters on January 16, 2015.