24/22
Rong Jinzhen showed a unique talent
Scenario
In the 1940s, the world was in crisis and it was crucial to decipher the enemy’s communication codes in a timely and accurate manner. He was noticed by many for accidentally solving the difficult problem. There are some similarities to “The Man Who Knew Infinity” (2015) in this film about Rong Jinzhen’s prodigious mathematical genius.
By pure chance, his problem-solving abilities are discovered by the professor (Daniel Wu), who adopts the docile orphan boy into his close-knit family and gives him the opportunity to thrive
Over the next two hours, we see him (Haoran Liu) transform from an academic to a man essential to the efforts of his embryonic country as it struggles to recover from years of internal strife and compete with larger, established regional powers such as Great Britain and the United States. For the latter nation, his Polish mentor “Liseiwicz”; (John Cusack) escapes when the Kuomintang government in China falls and the Communists take power – and these two men, from opposite sides of the world, quickly become the epitome of intellectual rivals with the former student now working for China’s equivalent of Bletchley Park trying to keep up with the incredibly complex “purple” and “black” ciphers developed by the US National Security Agency. What is clear is that both men are being manipulated by their respective states, and this has – as Lieseiwicz predicted from the beginning – a rather profound effect on their mental health and on Jinzhen’s marriage to Ye Xiaoning.
I really enjoyed the innovative way director Sicheng Chen tried to tell this story
His use of the bizarre and the surreal amidst the more standard cinematography serves to give us a sense of just how unbiased the thinking of these two men was as they developed and cracked these codes with billions of potential permutations. Using chess as a theme that tests intellectual rigor works very well, as does the sense that these two men are used to playing a game for their superiors that always seems to end in a stalemate. Cusack does well here, although he can overdo the manic aspects of his thought processes a little, but Haoran Liu is more engaging as the nerdy, socially inept scientist whose brain becomes like a train that he can’t control.
Impressive skills at cerebral gymnastics are revealed
There’s a slight element of jingoism in the narrative, with the People’s Republic being the bastion of all freedoms fighting against the imperialist West, but that’s just an aside to the story of one man. It’s very long: it struggles at times, but when it gets going it’s interesting and tries to show us a bit of the character of these two men against the backdrop of a beautiful production. .