Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
In 2016 the central bank of Bangladesh was robbed — but not in the traditional way, instead with the weapons and the venue in the digital realm, although that didn’t preclude some aspects of it being intriguingly in the physical world as well. This entire effort barely got any real attention in the mainstream press outside the world of international finance, but the story is indeed an interesting one.
The documentary Billion Dollar Heist comes from director Daniel Gordon, who has done a few documentary films in the past about sports, a few about North Korean athletes in particular — which has a bit of a connection here as well. The style of the documentary is a pretty slick one, with a lot of well considered graphics and a fun score — but there’s no one narrator or POV, as this is a talking head documentary.
We hear from experts in the fields of cybersecurity and security in general, people in finance, journalists, and eventually even people in FBI and other law enforcement agencies. The story is built up well, considering that I had no idea about most of the pieces — the movie has to explain how the hack/robbery actually took place, which involved a lot of specific technical info about the financial world and the bank in Bangladesh in particular, so it’s important to really explain things fully.
Although the talking heads are good at what they do, and the film always keeps things visually interesting, none of them specifically stood out as the stars of the tale, even in the telling, but it’s a fascinating story. First we set up the scenario — a perfectly picked day to avoid notice — and then build a background of how computer hacks have worked until people realized they could be used to make money. And suddenly that means foreign ‘actors’ — like rogue nations — might be putting real money and resources behind hacks.
Ultimately there’s no uncovering of who did the hack, because it’s simply still not known, although there are a few educated guesses about it. Instead the fun is learning the convoluted way the hackers managed to infiltrate the system, take advantage of circumstances and social engineering, slowly and methodically worked for months, and even weren’t as successful as they could’ve been if the timing had been slightly worse.
From my perspective it can be a little hard to please for a lot of documentary films of this type (the ‘talking head’ format), but the story here is interesting enough and the details complicated enough that hearing experts walk us through it is a good use of time. I haven’t seen any of the director’s other sports documentaries, but he has a good, engaging style here that’s pretty fun.
The real ‘lesson’ here is only really fully explained at the end, but it’s a good one — this hack was really only a good example of how potentially vulnerable our financial systems are, and the fact that so much of the global economy is entirely digital makes that a bit scary. By the last few minutes of the documentary, they basically imply we’re all screwed — but then again, I’m no expert.
Note: We support the current WGA/SAG strike and emphasize the importance of writers and actors and ensuring they and fellow creatives are compensated and treated fairly for their work. This piece was written during the 2023 WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. Without the labor of the writers and actors currently on strike, the movie being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Billion Dollar Heist has a run time of 1 hour 24 minutes, and is not rated.
Universal Pictures Home Entertainment
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