The Hummingbird Project (2019)

The Hummingbird Project presented a dilemma that I never knew existed. There is a world of High-Frequency Trading where the quicker you are, the more successful your company will be. Here is a simple, commonplace analogy of this: say, for instance, I posted an item for sale on the "Facebook Marketplace." Someone with a high-speed internet connection would likely be able to see/purchase the item long before a person with a slow, dial-up connection ever had the chance to make an inquiry. Instead of small items of the Facebook Marketplace, however, the film focuses on stocks, where milliseconds can equate to millions of dollars.

Two cousins, Vincent (Jesse Eisenberg) and Anton (Alexander Skarsgard) work at a hedge-fund company where the aforementioned scenario is part of their day-to-day livelihood. The duo, however, have a plan to build their own fiber-optic cable line that would stretch from Kansas to New Jersey, which would make them one millisecond faster than their current employer. The pair simultaneously offer their resignation to hedge-fund boss Eva Torres (Salma Hayek) and seek to make their plan come to fruition.

The film makes an attempt to setup the imagery of a David & Goliath battle, where Vincent and Anton are supposed to be David, and Eva (their vindictive former employer) is Goliath. In this capitalistic society, where one person is vying to make money faster than the next, one of the contractors challenges Vincent by asking, "Are we David?" It is an interesting question, and one that serves as a backdrop to the film, as both Vincent and Anton face their own existential crises in their pursuit of riches. The bigger question soon becomes, is the importance of money bigger than life, family, and virtue?

In what could have been a generic film that simply went through the motions, the bigger questions that it poses to the viewer and its main characters make this an important film in today's current economic and social climate. Written and directed by Kim Nguyen, the film is well crafted and doesn't miss a beat.