The Hummingbird Project

Let’s have a quick show of hands; how many of you know the business end of industrial drilling equipment? Yes, the Hummingbird Project is all about the competitive world of fibre-optic tunnel cable-drilling. And not just tangentially; the entire film really is about fibre-optic tunnel cable-drilling, it’s literally featured in almost every scene. For once, the camera does not pan shyly away when the drilling starts; there are massive close-ups of drill apparatus, ideal for people who love tractors, diggers and any kind of high-end industrial machinery.

Frsh from a similar role as facebook big bad Mark Zuckerburg in The Social Network, Jesse Eisenberg plays Vincent, a young trader who teams up with cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård) to build a fibre-optic line from NYC to Kansas, giving them an edge over other traders when it comes to the speed of the micro-transactions that they use. But their super-glam boss Eva Torres (Salma Hayek) wants to thwart them, a battle of wills results, complicated when Eisenberg’s character discovers that he needs urgent medical assistance for an unforeseen issue.

This is a fairly modern cyber-crime business drama, well-mounted and well-played; fortunately there’s little ‘dammit Marjorie’ dialogue and slamming fists on the table, but there is insight into how money is raised and spent in today’s world, and it’s not a pretty or reassuring picture. Eisenberg brings a little of his Social Network obsessiveness to playing Vincent, while the usually hunky Skarsgard is very much against type as hulking, bald Anton.

In fact, even if they’re far more aticulate characters, Vincent and Anton have a modern George and Lennie vibe that’s straight out of Of Mice and Men, and although Kim Nguyen’s film is a bit dry in places, it’s a worthwhile, grown up fable about how greed trips up the unwary. The amounts of money we read about every day, to pay for public events, to keep governments in office, to fund wars, are now so abstract and obscene we rarely think about them; these are sums far beyond the computation of ordinary people. But push comes to shove, and even if business is business, there’s a human cost involved and The Hummingbird Project brings the receipts in plentiful amounts.