Since donning the Thor costume, this month brought the first non-blockbuster role for Chris Hemsworth (discounting his pre-Marvel work on long-delayed MGM projects) with Ron Howard‘s Rush. Between his return as the Norse God this fall and the upcoming Avengers sequel, he’ll thankfully get another chance at something more substantial with the next Michael Mann project, Cyber. After a surprisingly quiet global shoot, with the film in post-production, we now have a few more details.
Speaking with Film Futter (via Coming Soon) while at the German premiere of Rush, the star said, “I just finished it. It’s based in the world of cyber terrorism,” as we’ve already learned. Going deeper into the plot he adds, “Basically, something similar to the Chicago Board of Trade is hacked into and it sets off a chain of events around the world, affecting the stock market. And the code that was used to hack into it, my character had written it years before and he happens to be in prison for cyber crime. He is pulled out and offered a deal if he works with a joint task force of the FBI and the Chinese government in trying to track this guy down.”
Describing it as “cat-and-mouse international heist thriller,” he adds, “It starts off in Chicago and ends up in Kuala Lumpur, in Hong Kong and in Jakarta.” The next part gets into some villain motivations, so steer clear if you want to go in blind, but he goes on to say, “It was fascinating. I knew nothing about that world. It’s very prominent now as we see what hacking and cyber terrorism can do, like shutting down power grids in other countries. In our film, he (the villain) shuts down the water pumps to overheat the cooling system in a nuclear power plant and causes a whole lot of chaos. When you do that research, you realize how vulnerable you are.” By the time it gets released, it’ll be five years since Mann’s last effort, so we’re greatly looking forward to what’s in store.
Also starring Viola Davis, Holt McCallany, Wei Tang and Leehom Wang, expect a 2014 release for Cyber, likely in the second half of the year.
What do you make of the new Cyber details?