Straight and narrow
Drama balances technical, emotional with a simple idea
Science fiction, with its robots, starships and futuristic weaponry, is a staple of cinema. Less common but just as satisfying when done well is what one might call science drama, where a down-to-earth story is grounded in real science.
We’ve had some strong examples of late, including Alpha (wolf becomes dog during the last ice age), Clara (romance between planet hunters) and To Dust (widower seeks answers about bodily decomposition).
There’s also Iceman, newly available on itunes, which imagines the last days of Ötzi, a man who died 5,300 years ago in the Swiss Alps and was discovered, preserved in ice, in 1991. It features an invented language and no subtitles, but the gist of the story is clear enough, and well worth the rental.
Quebec writer-director Kim Nguyen’s latest is another example. The Hummingbird Project imagines a small team of scientist-entrepreneurs trying to build an underground fibre-optic cable 1,600 kilometres from Kansas to New Jersey. If successful, it will shave 14 milliseconds off the transit of data from one financial hub to another.
The time it takes a hummingbird to flap its wings once will give them a billion-dollar edge on Wall Street.
The science is solid. A headline in New Scientist magazine from 2011, when this movie is set, declared: “Light is not fast enough for high-speed stock trading.” Much more recently — and personally — an Ontario Parks spokesperson informed me that my inability to reserve a highly desired campsite online was because my computer’s clock may be “faster or slower than time displayed on the reservation system server. Even within a thousandth of a second.” Damn!
Nguyen has made some creative casting choices. Jesse Eisenberg does a good job as Vincent Zaleski, driven to the point of mania with the idea of beating the financial markets at their own game.
He compares his “nanosecond financial engineering” to time travel and doubles down on his efforts after some personal news midway through the film rocks him on his heels.
Quebec’s Michael Mando plays Mark Vega, Vincent’s chief contractor, while Salma Hayek plays against type as his former boss, determined to stop his plans, or at least slow them down by a crucial millisecond or two.
But the weak link in the cast is Alexander Skarsgård as Vincent’s tech-savvy cousin, Anton. The script sets him up as a kind of idiot savant with a comical aversion to flying, but that personality tends to fluctuate to fit what the story requires in the moment. It’s difficult to root for a character you can’t quite pin down.
Even so, Nguyen does a great job balancing the technical and the emotional sides of his story. His last film, 2017’s Eye on Juliet, a romance featuring remote-control security robots, was lopsided in comparison.
And there’s something refreshingly simple behind the idea of building a super-straight speed-of-light pipeline under the Appalachians to quicken commerce. Strip away the tech-talk, and it’s basically the story of 19th-century railway barons.