The Hummingbird Project (2018)
(On Cable TV, September 2019) It’s amazing how many highly specialized spheres of our modern world end up being featured in mass-market entertainment. It may be even more amazing to see how French-Canadian writer-director Kim Nguyen has gone from elliptical fantasy debut Le Marais to Hollywood-grade techno-thriller The Hummingbird Project. Here, Nguyen tackles the business of laying cables from one financial power centre to the other to facilitate High-Frequency Trading, a business in which millions or billions can ride on fractions of a second. Any conceivable way to shaving a fraction of a millisecond in between transactions can be a massive market advantage, and so the film focuses on a pair of entrepreneurs (Alexander Skarsgård playing someone on the autistic spectrum, and Jesse Eisenberg in his familiar alpha-nerd persona), leaving behind their previous company to build a fibre-optic line. Hollywood used to make grandiose movies about building railroads, and The Hummingbird Project could have headed in that direction … alas, this being the enlightened no-fun 2010s, Nguyen isn’t about to let us have any civilization-building fun: The film takes great pain not only to point out that this fibre line is going to be used for rainforest-killing lucrative purposes, but goes out of its way to punish its characters through various ailments and ultimately make their efforts redundant. That’s really too bad, because for a while The Hummingbird Project does create a powerful illusion of an upbeat big-infrastructure project. Nguyen effectively uses his budget to give us a glimpse of what it takes to create the modern infrastructure upon which the Internet rests, and the scope of the film feels vertiginous at times as our characters negotiate with homeowners for property rights, head into swamps to lay down the fibre despite natural obstacles, and overcomes many difficult odds along their way. That’s the kind of triumph I would have liked to see along the lines of railway-building epics, but that’s not what the film is interested in. I still had a decently good time along the way. While I think that Skarsgård’s character is overexposed, I’m comfortable with the kind of fast-talking smart guy played by Eisenberg, and Michael Mando is a bit of a revelation as the level-headed one in the lead cable-layer trio. (French-Canadian actress Ayisha Issa also shows up in a small but striking role—I hope this turn promises more from her.) This being said, I can’t deny that much of The Hummingbird Project’s appeal rests with a vengeful character magnificently played by Salma Hayek in a white-haired bespectacled performance oscillating between sexiness and pure evil—no matter her age, she’s still got it. Still, Hayek can’t be in all of the film’s scenes and so I’m left with a disappointment—a film that has about three-quarter of what it takes to deliver something exceptional, but seem content to retreat in anti-technological platitudes about slowing down.
