In the 1940s, the world was in turmoil, and it was crucial to decipher the enemy's communication codes in a timely and accurate manner. Rong Jinzhen has shown amazing mathematical talent since her childhood, and because she solved the problems assigned by her math teacher, she was noticed by more people, and even walked into the door of code-breaking by mistake.
Liu Haoran
Rong Jinzhen
John Cusack
Isis
Chen Daoming
Zheng Mou
Daniel Wu
Rong Xiaolai
Yu Feihong
Ye Xiaoning 'Ms. Rong'
Ren Luyao
Xiao-mei
Chen Yusi
Rong Biyu
Yutian Wang
Wa Xili
Zhou You
Yan Shi
Zhu Zhu
Ms. Isis
Cao Cuifen
Old Age Rong Biyu
Wu Yanshu
Old Age Xiao-mei
Xu Huanshan
Vasily (Elder)
Wang Baoqiang
A Bing
Xiao Yang
Chess Madman
Pan Yueming
Qian Xuesen
Sha Baoliang
Professor
Ouyang Nana
Intelligence Officer
Jason Koo
Student
Liu Jin
Zhou Enlai
Andy Friend
McDonald
Zhou Yemang
Chief Zeng
Wang Longzheng
Chief Ma
Yuan Jinhui
Rong Jinzhen (Junior)
Choenyi Tsering
Mrs. Chen
Gai Yuexi
Rong Youying
Kevin Lee
Walrus Man
Rovaif Babar
Chen Sicheng
Self
Feng Xueya
Rong Biyu(Junior)
Sean Kohnke
American General
Laptsevich Evelina
American Woman
Di Wu
Student Prankster
Qinuo Li
Student Prankster
Junyi Liang
The Porter
Wang Naixun
Man Shot Down
Han Jiang
Short Guard
Heinz-Dieter Schweinsberg
Auslander
Qiu Xinzhi
General
Director, Writer
Chen Sicheng
Screenstory
Jia Mai
Writer
Christopher MacBride
August 27, 2024
6
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.
Status:
Released
Original Language:
Mandarin
Budget:
$0.00
Revenue:
$47,219,400.00