The Hummingbird Project

 

Celebrated Canadian director Kim Nguyen's 2018 film The Hummingbird Project (now on Showtime) is an ambitious but ultimately unsuccessful picture about an ambitious venture to run fiber-optic cable in a straight line the thousand miles from Kansas to New Jersey, reducing processing time by a millisecond (the single beat of a hummingbird's wing), which, according to the narrative, would translate into hundreds of millions of dollars in a Wall Street minute. The picture is ambitious because it proposes to "sexify" code-writing and industrial and civil engineering and it is unsuccessful for pretty much the same reason. But it does deliver several solid thoughts.

Nguyen, who directed the Oscar-nominated War Witch (2012), could have used some of 2010's The Social Network's brisk pacing and narrative clarity -- after all, he also had that picture's Jesse Eisenberg as his lead, Vincent Zaleski -- or 2015's The Big Short's cockeyed textual notes and celebrity explainers. Still, the film does say some interesting things about (1) competition in the world of information technology in the person of Salma Hayek's menacing tech mogul Eva Torres, (2) human and machine interface through Alexander Skarsgård's performance as the brilliant but fragile programmer Anton Zaleski, and (3) the cost of all of this.

In that regard, there are two important take aways: (1) time, information and timely information are all "money," and (2) sometimes a triple-scoop ice cream cone is worth more.