CinemaSerf

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.