The Hummingbird Project, now available on Netflix, showcases the need for speed on Wall Street. Mere milliseconds can make the difference between profit and loss in a high speed world where algorithms and machines make all the buying and selling decisions.
The Hummingbird Project trailer that I first watched showed a powerful looking Salma Hayek berating a cowering Alexander Skarsgård, who was up to his neck in a hot tub. The words “lines of code” were used. After an enticement like that, I was obligated to watch.
I was disappointed that Salma Hayek wasn’t in more of the film. It was an urgently paced story about Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and his cousin Anton (Alexander Skarsgård). They were working for Eva Torres (Salma Hayek), trying to shave milliseconds off the time needed to gather information about stock trades.
They decided to go out on their own to build an underground fiber-optic cable straight between Kansas and New Jersey that Anton would somehow make faster than the existing system.
They enlisted a whole army of workers, got the capital, and started drilling. Mark (Michael Mando) was in charge of construction. I liked the woman Ophelia (Ayisha Issa) they hired to pilot the giant Sikorsky helicopter. The chopper brought drilling equipment into the national park land around the Appalachian Mountains.
It was a mad race of a movie. Hurry to get the job done. Hurry to do it before Eva Torres beat them to the punch with something else. Hurry before Vincent got too ill. If you have a movie about things that have to be fast, Jesse Eisenberg is the perfect actor. That man can talk faster and seem more frantic than any other actor out there.
There were some nice twists in the plot and a moralist message about the high-speed digital nature of life today. Overall, however, I would only call the film average.
See if the trailer catches your interest.
Have you seen this film? What did you think of it?