Mark Reviews Movies: THE HUMMINGBIRD PROJECT

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Review by Mark Dujsik | March 21, 2019

Writer/director Kim Nguyen gives us two stories in The Hummingbird Project. The first is the story of how two cousins, one tech-minded and the other business-savvy, try to surpass the available technology for high-frequency market trading. It's about information flowing a thousand miles in terms of milliseconds and land deals and dozens of construction crews building a tunnel across the country. The second story is how this plan becomes an obsession for the two men, as they give up everything in their lives in order to make data move a single millisecond faster.

That amount of time seems cosmically insignificant. It's the amount of time, as one character puts it, in which a hummingbird makes a single flap of its wings. In this world of high-stake finance involving computer algorithms calculating prices and profits, though, it can make or lose millions—maybe hundreds of millions—of dollars for whoever can obtain and send information that much quicker.

The movie explains the importance of such a miniscule particle of time, and it also shows the outlandish operation that goes into ensuring that someone can take advantage of something that human beings cannot measure without computing help. We get the technical side of it quite clearly, in other words, but that side is about as exciting as it sounds. It's not, to put it bluntly.

More intriguing is the personal side, as Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton Zaleski (Alexander Skarsgård) risk health, family, freedom, decency, and sanity in order to make the dream of gaining one millisecond a reality. The two cousins are quite different, with Vincent serving as the convincing, slightly conniving mouthpiece for the plan and Anton serving as the quiet, shut-in technology genius who can find the right combination of devices and coding to make the plan work.

The one characteristic they share, though, is that neither one is particularly talkative about what really matters to them—what really makes them tick. A line of fiber-optic cable, running from Kansas to Wall Street, is the only thing that matters to them for the entirety of this story.

Nguyen's screenplay, then, is single-minded in its focus. Yes, it's partly a story of obsession, but that obsession is all about technology. Given that the other side of this tale is about how that technology works, the whole of the movie becomes about that one thing. If that thing isn't exciting or intriguing or particularly dramatic, as is the case with this particular tech enterprise, the story itself inevitably will reflect that.

At the start, Vincent and Anton work for a trading company run by Eva (Salma Hayek), who's looking for ways to increase the speed of data getting to her traders and believes Anton's know-how could be the key. Meanwhile, Vincent has gained the support of a wealthy investor (played by Frank Schorpion) in his own plan: to build a straight, uninterrupted line of fiber-optic cable from a stock exchange in the Midwest to the heart of the financial district in New York City.

This means resigning from their current employment, potentially facing retaliation from Eva, and traveling across the country. Anton leaves behind his wife (played by Sarah Goldberg) and kids, although he barely notices their absence. For his part, Vincent has to negotiate land leases with homeowners, major construction work on land protected by the federal and state governments, and some terrible indigestion that, after a visit to the doctor, turns out to be much worse.

The performances from Eisenberg and Skarsgård are quite good, especially in tandem. Each provides a distinct energy, with the former as an openly resentful motor-mouth and the latter—almost unrecognizable with a mostly bald head and a slouching posture that distorts his tall frame—as an on-edge introvert. As different as the two actors' performances themselves are, there is a complementary sense of anxiety about and fixation on the task at hand.

At first, the process of that task is involving. Nguyen succinctly and clearly communicates the ins and outs of high-frequency trading, the importance of tiny slices of time within that practice, and the huge scope of what a multi-part, interstate construction job would be like. After a short while, though, it becomes all too obvious that the heart of this story is less about the people involved and more about the mechanics of the project.

What's missing is a genuine sense of humanity beneath and behind this story. We get hints at what may have driven Vincent to his need to prove himself, and Anton makes it pretty clear that he simply wants to be alone—free to do what he wants with only his family as an occasional interruption. As distinct as the two lead characters of The Hummingbird Project may be, they merge into a single thematic purpose. They, along with the movie itself, constantly reassert the same point: Obsession is damaging to one's physical, emotional, and psychological states. Here, the obsession with processes and mechanics is damaging to the movie's dramatic potential.

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