Blackhat

Great movie. The characters are reasonably intelligent, not bulletproof, and the story is interesting. It was definitely worth watching. The dedication to realism was, in my opinion, impressive. This movie also has, far and away, the most accurate hacking I've seen in any movie. Almost everything typed into a computer was legit and added to the story if you know what it means (for example, when the main character gets a shell on a system which had been hacked into, he immediately types `who` to find the hacker has an active shell open with username sdksdk, then types `write sdksdk` to send a message to him). Even the visuals of hardware -- what the inside of a server room, inside of a computer, inside of a processor, all the way down to visualizations of the transistors on the die (these are way too small to see with an optical microscope, but the portrayal was accurate to the electron microscope images I've seen) -- looked realistic. They definitely got people who absolutely knew what they were doing to help with the portrayals of the hardware and software. I want to see more movies with this kind of accuracy.

This movie grabbed me from the beginning. No it doesnt hold your hand and spell everything out, the filmmaker actually respects the audience's intelligence . The action is not wall to wall but is very well done and complements the story instead of overtaking it. If you want to see stuff blow up and mindless action, and I love those too from time time, watch transformers. If you want an intelligent well made thriller watch this movie along with some other Michael Mann favorites like collateral, and Heat

Truly awful. No character development. Paper thin plot that you may have seen about a hundred times in movies like Swordfish and Mad Max. Tremendous factual inconsistencies (guy picked up from prison in Pennsylvania, magically gets on a plane at LAX). Obvious voiceovers to cover lousy editing. At one point, they even had a Red Shirt killed, just like on Star Trek (this is when a nameless character is introduced just so someone can die, in this case among shipyard containers). Incorrect radiation decontamination procedures, anticlimactic explosions, mythically slow plot with underwhelming twists that are really just slight bends, and kitsch codenames like "ghostman" and "black widow."