Decoded

There are quite a few similarities with "The Man Who Knew Infinity" (2015) in this film about the prodigious mathematical genius of Rong Jinzhen. By pure fluke, his problem-solving skills are spotted by teacher (Daniel Wu) who adopts the orphaned, rather subdued, boy into his close-knit family and provides him the opportunity to thrive. Over the next couple of hours we watch him (Haoran Liu) develop into an academic then into a man crucial to the efforts of his embryonic country as it struggles to recover from years of internal strife and to compete with the more established regional powers like the UK and the USA. It's to that latter nation that his Polish-born mentor "Liseiwicz" (John Cusack) escapes when the Kuomintang government in China falls and the communists take over - and these two men, on opposite sides of the world, soon become the epitome of intellectual rivals with the erstwhile pupil now working for the Chinese equivalent of Bletchley Park trying to keep pace with the incredibly complex "purple" and "black" ciphers being developed by the American National Security Agency. What's clear is the two men are being manipulated but their respective states and that is having - as Lieseiwicz predicted early on - quite a profound effect on their respective mental health and on Jinzhen's marriage to Ye Xiaoning. I quite liked the innovative way in which director Sicheng Chen tried to tell this tory. His use of the bizarre and the surreal amidst the more standard photography serves to give us an insight into just how un-lateral the thinking of these two men was when developing and cracking these codes with billions of potential permutations. The use of chess as a theme testing intellectual rigour works quite well too as does the sense that these two men and being used to play a game by their superiors that always looks likely to end in stalemate. Cusack does fine here, though maybe he over-does the maniacal aspects of his thought processes a little, but it's Haoran Liu who delivers more engagingly as the geeky, socially inept, scientist whose brain becomes like a train running out of control. This does have a slight element of jingoism to the narrative, the People's Republic being the bastion of all freedoms fighting the Imperialist West, but that's really only a sideline as the story of one man's impressive skills with cerebral gymnastics unfolds. It is too long: it does plod at times, but when it hits it's stride, it's interesting and attempts to show us a little of the character of these two men against a backdrop of a good looking production. A story of two addicts, really.

I went into the movie thinking it's the Chinese Oppenheimer. It is that, but it's also influenced by Cloud Atlas, Inception and A Beautiful Mind.

The film is visually beautiful. The dream sequences were the most visually interesting and reminded me of the epic scenes in Cloud Atlas.

The acting was well done. This is a Chinese film, a Chinese story, a love letter to China. The theme of love runs throughout, juxtaposed against the backdrop of war. Love of family, love of a mentor/student, romantic love, and all culminating in a love of country.

The reason I felt A Beautiful Mind and Inception were more influential is the main character's struggle to know what is real and what is the dream world.

What could have been better:

Pacing. Some parts were slower, followed by a fast paced scene. Seemed like a piece of classical music with adagio movements leading up to crescendo parts. While it works in music, for me, it doesn't work as well in film.

I would have liked more references to when things were taking place. There are a few, but at a point they stop and maybe it's to make the audience feel as lost as the main character, but it didn't help the story.

Also, more cross language scenes. The film is predominantly in Chinese with English/Chinese subtitles, but when John Cusack is on screen he predominantly speaks English.

John Cusack's character at the beginning is a Polish math professor in China teaching to all Chinese students and there wasn't even an interpreter.

Logically, I was looking for some demonstration that the students knew English or the presence of an interpreter.

I could say more but I don't want to give out spoilers.

Overall, a good solid movie.

With a broken narrative, an abrupt and booming soundtrack, and a montage of interspersed dreams and realities, it's clear that the director is trying to tell the story of The Imitation Game and Oppenheimer in the same way that Inception did, with a disastrous ending.

The first half of the movie is a self-referential narrative of the hero's life, with random stuffing about the Sino-Japanese War, the Communist Civil War, and his sister's forbidden feelings for him (which part of the plot that I couldn't understand the most). The second half of the film is all about him having maniacal dreams inside the base and figuring out the math from them. Science is portrayed by the director as a joke, as rediculous as a Chinese dress-up Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds imagined by a kid born in a rural area and sent to a closed base immediately after college.

The movie always depicts an enemy, be it the Japanese, the Nationalists, the Americans or his teacher, who is driven from a pure mathematician to a madman, and these pressures fall on the audience in equal proportions, while he himself suddenly figures everything out at the last second and then the movie comes to a screeching halt, leaving behind a bunch of pathetic viewers who have had a bellyful of vomitus and nowhere to vomit, and finally have to watch a bonus scene of the director's extreme narcissism.

The movie is really long ... a total of 2 hours and 40ish minutes... going in I thought i was going to fall asleep and miss out a few scenes but the story actually kept me up.

Think of this movie as what Oppenheimer SHOULD have been... Oppenheimer being so long drawout, boring, slow, and way too political correct... This movie hits the sweet spot between being insightful/intelligent vs story telling/fiction. The flow of the plot is just very well thoughtout that it keeps a consistant pace yet kept the contents interesting without trying to display political correctness and at the same time, kept the story mostly true to the past history in China. If you don't know much about the war in China, you'll learn alot about it. If you already know what had happened, you'll see it from a different yet very realistic perspective.

Highly recommeneded.

John cusack did an absolutely Oscar worth acting in the movie.

From a Western perspective this was an odd one, Chinese protagonist with the West portrayed as the bad guys(or at least the opposition) for the bulk of the movie.

Yet as an autistic individual, the protagonist was at least autistic-coded and relatable, missing a lot of social cues but honourable.

The main Western character wasn't portrayed as evil per se though the portrayal was still a bit odd. Exile fleeing occupied Poland, winds up in China having picked up native-level US-English along the way. OK, right fine.

And er...major goof..."I am the Walrus" had not been released in 1964 yet it still gets referenced heavilly.

Still, what felt like a "scraping the bottom of the barrel" cinema trip still worked out with the main conflict portrayed as a brutal chess match between friends turned rivals.