Just when I thought we can move past Blackhat, Michael Mann's unfortunate cyber-tech thriller from 2015, he just recently mentioned to IndieWire that the director's cut he is releasing is a significant improvement over the theatrical release:
“I wasn’t 100% happy with it,” Mann admitted of the original cut. “It was a challenging film to do because the ambition of the film was to an event driven narrative and develop characters within scenes, but have a very rapid narrative with rhythms imitative of how fast our world moves today in the digital information age. So this is why I intentionally had a rapidly driving plotline. But the engine of that was cyber tech so you had to track with the search for the code… which leads you on and on and on through various hacking techniques. So in moving some of the big pieces of story around I may have obfuscated [the audience] tracking the events of the basic plot.”
"Mann said he put things back how they “originally” were, suggesting that in his pre-release cut, the soy hack was in front of the nuclear hack and thus this new version is what he originally intended, but he either second-guessed or overworked the theatrical edit." Mann to The Playlist
Ok, fair enough. I'm actually intrigued. Because every single problem he mentions here is what was wrong with Blackhat. Its pacing was atrocious and it didn't develop any of its characters coherently. I'll be taking a good luck at this new version because, well, it's Michael Mann and there's no way the director of Manhunter, Thief, Heat, Collateral, The Insider and Ali could conceivably agree to the heaping pile of junk that was released almost exactly a year ago.
http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/listen-michael-mann-talks-changes-to-blackhat-last-of-the-mohicans-possible-sci-fi-project-in-1-hour-talk-20160215