Jie mi

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.

The long-awaited comeback of filmmaker Chen Sicheng presents a well-crafted, delicately performed period drama centered around an autistic young code-breaker and his American tutor, who also serves as his rival.

"Decoded," directed by Chen Sicheng, is a 2024 Chinese film that explores the complex realms of cryptography and espionage. The story centers on a talented cryptographer who finds himself caught in a high-stakes pursuit, striving to unravel a series of enigmatic messages with potentially significant consequences.

The film boasts impressive visuals, featuring cinematography that effectively conveys both the tension of the storyline and the allure of its locations. Chen Sicheng's direction skillfully balances suspenseful moments with character development. The cast delivers strong performances, especially the lead Haoran Liu, who adds depth to a multifaceted character grappling with ethical challenges in a secretive environment.

Despite its captivating premise, some viewers might perceive the pacing as inconsistent, particularly during the second act, where the narrative occasionally loses focus. Additionally, certain aspects of the plot may seem familiar to genre enthusiasts, lacking the fresh twists that could enhance the experience... and all that extended to over 2.5 hours!

In summary, "Decoded" presents a compelling examination of its themes, bolstered by solid performances and high production quality. It is likely to attract thriller aficionados and those intrigued by the subtleties of cryptography, although it may not completely fulfill the expectations of those in search of an innovative storyline.

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.

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.

I always love watching propadanga movies made in dictatorships. I was born in the USSR and watched a lot of soviet ones in my childhood. I also enjoyed the few Nazi Germany ones that I could find. Today one can easily find an American progandist movie: basically any spy/action thriller will be about some American saving the world or just the US so that the great American values would prevail. Well, this movie is a rare treat where you finally see Americans as caricature villans and "The Party" as the ultimate bastion of wisdom (yes, there is only one party, as it should be in any glorious society of the future).

The movie is beautifully shot. You could pause it at almost any moment, and you'd get a picture that you could print out, frame, and put on a wall. However, the talent of the director is basically wasted because visual perfection serves a boring, overly long and pompous story of a heroic Chinese saving The Country (actually, just the communist part of it, and not even as much from the evil Americans but rather from the capitalist Chinese who escaped to Taiwan island - yep those are really bad, bad people, as everyone should know).

It ends up as an unintentionally (?) tragic story of 2 geniuses wasting their lives in prison-like camps on a pointless competition between some equally corrupt, equally evil higher-ups basically fighting for turf. Ironically, the Polish genius indicates at the very start where those brains would be best used instead: in advancement of computer tech! The one that created the post-industrial societies we all enjoy nowadays. Yet serving The Country trumps any such nonsese, right? In the finale, the movie tells you again so that you don't forget: the Country is a territory that we must defend, and also the people and the culture. Glory to Arstotska! (if you don't know this phrase, it's from the game "Papers Please", go play it)

On a side note, the romance subplot is somewhat unrealistic. Why would a girl fall in love with this ugly dude who doesn't care about her in the least and spends all his time with his ciphers? She ends up babysitting him like a mother. Well, guess she had her own issues, so she needed a big baby boy to take care of. Fortunately, they don't make babies in that semi-prison camp where they are located, so when the main character's schizophrenia finally takes him over, and he passes away, there is no legacy left but the cracked ciphers.