“Rush” (review here) went into wide release this past weekend to a middling response over in the U.S., but back in Europe it’s attracting much greater interest, telling as it does the story of two European heroes of a chiefly European sport. Thus it was that star Chris Hemsworth was talking to German website FilmFutter when he revealed some details of his next big film, an untitled Michael Mann thriller which is widely but not officially being referred to as “Cyber,” for some reason.
Anyway, “[Cyber],” the way Hemsworth tells it, is to be a high-tech espionage flick about hackers. More specifically, Hemsworth explained it like this: “It’s based in the world of cyber-terrorism. 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. It starts off in Chicago and ends up in Kuala Lumpur, in Hong Kong and in Jakarta. It’s this sort of cat-and-mouse international heist-thriller.”
And while we’re not sure if this is spoiler territory or not, Hemsworth adds a couple of plot points that are intriguing. “It was 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 shuts down the water pumps to overheat the cooling system in a nuclear power plant and causes a whole lot of chaos,” he said. “When you do that research you realize, how vulnerable you are.”
Hemsworth will appear alongside Viola Davis and Tang Wei (of “Lust, Caution”), with “Cyber” marking Mann’s first film since the divisive “Public Enemies,” which never quite satisfied anyone but interested everyone, and it’ll be good to have him back at work. There’s no release date for “Cyber” either, but we can assume it’ll be sometime in 2014: Hemsworth just got done shooting it. We’ll let you know when it gets a real title (please, please don’t let “Cyber” be the real title…) and a release date. [via JoBlo]