Decoded (2024)

★ 6.1 2h 36m IMDb

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.

Decoded

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Cast

Liu Haoran
Liu Haoran as 容金珍 Age 28 · Pingdingshan, Henan, China Liu Haoran, also known as Turbo Liu, is a Chinese actor born on October 10, 1997, in Pingdingshan, Henan, China. He moved to Beijing at the age of 12 to attend the Affiliated Secondary School of Beiji...
John Cusack
John Cusack as 希伊斯 Age 59 · Evanston, Illinois, USA John Paul Cusack (born June 28, 1966) is an American actor. Cusack began acting in films during the 1980s, starring in coming-of-age dramedies such as Sixteen Candles (1984), Better Off Dead (1985), T...
Chen Daoming
Chen Daoming as 郑某 Age 70 · Tianjin, China Chen Daoming (born 26 April 1955) is a Chinese actor who has starred in various genres of film and television series..
Daniel Wu
Daniel Wu as 小黎黎(容小来) Age 51 · Berkeley, California, USA Daniel Wu Neh-Tsu (Chinese: 吳彥祖; born September 30, 1974) is a Hong Kong actor and filmmaker. He is known as a "flexible and distinctive" leading actor in the Chinese language film industry. Since his...
Yu Feihong
Yu Feihong as 叶筱凝(容太太) Age 55 · Hangzhou, Zhejiang, China Feihong Yu is a young Chinese actress, best known to Americans for her highlight role in "The Joy Luck Club" as "Ying Ying", the young mother who drowns her baby after being betrayed by her husband. S...
Chen Sicheng
Chen Sicheng as 我 Age 48 · Shenyang, Liaoning, China Chen Sicheng (Chinese: 陈思诚, born February 22, 1978 in Shenyang) is a Chinese actor, director and screenwriter. He graduated from the Central Academy of Drama, and is known for his leading roles in the...

Audience Reviews

CinemaSerf 6/10 Aug 27, 2024
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.

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