解密, or
Decoded as it's being called in the U.S., is a decidedly bad adaptation of a novel that actually got pretty good reviews, and which was written by an actual former member of the Chinese military.
That the novel on which this is based was written by someone with possible actual experience in the Chinese military tells us - absolutely nothing;
as reviewers pointed out when praising the novel, it probably is mostly entirely fictional.
The movie does seem, at first impression, to have at least a vaguely tenuous connection to real-life spycraft.
But what little resemblance to real life counter-intelligence activities this
might have had go largely out the window once it becomes its protagonist (Liu Haoran) will rely largely on the interpretation of his own dreams to crack the toughest encryption ever devised by U.S. intelligence at the height of the Cold War.
Yup, you read that correctly: a single Chinese code-breaker relies on interpreting his own dreams to crack the toughest encryption hitherto devised by the U.S. National Security Agency.
You see, it also happens that the cryptography expert at the NSA is none other than Professor Liseiwicz, played with broad abandon by a puffy-looking John Cusack; the professor was the former mentor of the Chinese code-breaker, after which the young man was recruited by China's top military agency.
If that wasn't already loopy enough, the Chinese code-breaker's dreams are brought to life with extraordinarily cheesy computer graphics, which most closely resemble an AI program with remarkably bad taste, or a computer screensaver from the 1990s.
To make matters worse, the movie goes on for a mind-numbing 2 and 1/2 hours.
But you might have drifted off long before the movie ends, enjoying some sweet dreams of your own.
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