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The highlight of the summer season, Chen Sicheng's "Decryption", has barely reached 300 million yuan in box office after 10 days of release, and Douban's score is 6.6. This result, whether measured in terms of business or word of mouth, is frankly not ideal for the ambitious Chen Sicheng.

So what exactly is the reason for the above results? I see many comments around me and even friends in the industry have put forward various reasons: some talked about the general weakness of the market this year, some talked about the impact of the Olympic cycle on attendance, some talked about the overall decline in young people's desire to watch movies, and some attributed the problem to Chen Sicheng's poor "popularity"... No matter what, there is a reality that I believe everyone agrees on: in today's mobile Internet era, the authority and centrality of traditional film criticism are almost disappearing, and based on the purely individual feelings of consumers and whether the film can make them want to share, it is ultimately glued together into an ambiguous and half-believed number on the scoring platform, which determines the fate of the film and its creators.

There is probably no way to change this in today's noisy public opinion field. My comments can only represent myself, and I have no intention of guiding or influencing anything. As people who have some background in film history research, when we watch a film, we sometimes judge the position of the film from the overall development of time. If we position "Decoding" as a "new mainstream blockbuster" model, just like the key words presented in the promotional poster - "subverting imagination", I think these four words are quite appropriate.

"The Decryption" not only tells a story about a subject that has rarely been touched upon in previous domestic films, but its audio-visual presentation is also different from all of Chen Sicheng's previous films. It also carries a heavy taste of life in the description of the protagonist's ups and downs in fate, making it a true "subversive imagination" work.

Rationally speaking, being able to present such subject matter on the screen in this way is also one of Chen Sicheng's multiple breakthroughs in film creation.

Because there has never been such a thing in the history of Chinese films.

The first breakthrough of "Decryption" is that it depicts heroic images and writes heroic history in an unprecedented way.

The film's protagonist, Rong Jinzhen, is an atypical hero. He has a rough life and a withdrawn personality, but he has shown amazing mathematical talent since childhood. This gift is like a double-edged sword, which helps him overcome difficulties again and again in the turmoil of the times and meet a wise mentor when the country needs him. At the same time, it also makes him fall into an inescapable nightmare, with the risk of his mind being devoured.

The film has an interview-style structure, with the story told by Rong Jinzhen's foster sister, his wife, and his work partner, to describe the protagonist. The audience needs to piece together an image of the protagonist from memories of different perspectives. This image, from vague to clear, undoubtedly embodies the shadows of countless unsung heroes in history.

Over a twenty-year time span, as Rong Jinzhen's life slowly unfolds, the audience also walks into the dusty historical scene. This design makes Rong Jinzhen's story both documentary and legendary.

The second breakthrough of "Decryption" is to show the audience how the "hidden front" in history was able to achieve great results with little effort and save the country from danger.

The scenes where Rong Jinzhen works and lives in Unit 701 are equivalent to showing the audience in a very "technical" way how national secret agencies in history operated, how to overcome layers of difficulties, and how to fight wits and courage with opponents.

Mai Jia, the original author of the film's story, worked in a secret agency similar to the 701 in the film. It can be seen that the filming team put in a lot of effort. The 701 in the film was all shot on location, showing a strict spatial planning and a strong sense of life. Mai Jia, who experienced it personally, supervised all of this on the spot, giving the audience the opportunity to enter the "secret place" and explore it.

In the process of cracking the "Purple Code" and "Black Code" and other difficult problems, our perspective not only advances layer by layer inside 701, but also shuttles between 701, Hong Kong, and Washington.

The entire chain of breaking secrets is strung together with many impressive characters, who appear one by one.

In addition to the leading actor Liu Haoran who plays "Rong Jinzhen", actors such as Chen Daoming who plays "Old Zheng", Zhou You who plays "Director Yan", Wang Yutian who plays "Vasily", and Xiao Yang who plays "Chess Crazy" and many others have all given impressive performances, and everyone's "past and present life" is worth pondering.

Wang Baoqiang's guest appearance as "A Bing" is connected to "The Whisperer", which is a magical moment of "Mai Jia's spy war universe".

The third breakthrough of "The Decryptor", which is also the most distinctive feature of the film, is the treatment of dreams.

Rong Jinzhen is a mathematical genius who can solve mathematical problems by interpreting dreams. Even more valuable is a line from Rong Jinzhen: In dreams, I also think.

For a taciturn person like Rong Jinzhen, his dream analysis just shows his inner world. At the same time, visualizing the decryption process also helps the audience understand and experience how the decryption is achieved and how to achieve a breakthrough.

Rong Jinzhen encountered many opponents in his decryption career. His first opponent was his teacher, Professor Schiess, his second opponent was the newly born computer ENIAC, and his third opponent should be himself who could not distinguish between reality and dreams.

Obviously, whether it is the battle between human brains, man and machine, or people's subconscious self-entanglement, it requires extremely strong audio-visual language to "translate" it to movie audiences.

Such a setting places high demands on the creative team. Because there have been many examples of showing dreams in movies. This time, "Decryption" has achieved a rare balance between reality and spectacle, which is absolutely inseparable from the breakthrough in industrial technology. It not only stops at creating visual spectacles, but also truly makes dreams into the externalization of psychological reality.

The director of photography of this film, Cao Yu, is known for his ability to be both civil and military. Whether it is the stunning lighting in "Legend of the Demon Cat" or the battle scene scheduling in "Eight Hundred", he can be fully utilized in "Decryption". Recently, I listened to a detailed photography creation master class he gave for "Decryption" at Emperor Entertainment Group, which was very useful. The scene of Rong Jinzhen and Xi Yis's "contest" and "reunion" at the seaside, the switching between the rushing waves and the fluttering curtains is a stroke of genius in the description of dreams.

In the story, Rong Jinzhen needs to turn on and off the lights to distinguish between dreams and reality. One of the challenges in film production itself is how to balance dreams and reality, how to integrate the audiovisual language of the two worlds, while allowing the audience to distinguish between the two worlds.

The film's special effects team achieved a tacit cooperation with the art and photography teams. As the audience, we often slip into dreams unknowingly, or even integrate into dreams, just like the protagonists. We can find the "click" between dreams and reality, and it is these "clicks" that attract the audience to watch layer by layer.

Everyone is a unique code, and life is a process of decryption.

The film introduces the audience to a mysterious protagonist, Rong Jinzhen, whose life still has many unsolved mysteries. But it is these openings left by the film that give this character and the entire mystery story a dreamlike uncertainty and the resulting appeal.

This bold blank space and overtones is another breakthrough by Chen Sicheng.

Of course, there are some settings in the movie that are not perfect and even puzzle me: for example, the enemy directly shoots with guns in the center of Nanjing after the founding of the People's Republic of China, intending to eliminate Rong Jinzhen; for example, why did Rong's dream in 1963 appear a rehearsal clip of the "model opera" "Red Lantern"; and whether there was a large-scale urban criticism phenomenon at the same time... All these things may be regarded as bugs, and as a tangle of dreams and reality, and it is unknown whether time and space are accelerated or even reversed (in this way, Chen Sicheng seems to have more of a Nolan feeling:). After all, let's not forget that this movie is set in a "Citizen Kane"-style interview memory. And memories themselves may be entangled, confused and uncertain.

In short, for "Decryption", I saw Chen Sicheng's efforts and breakthroughs to a great extent, which made my criticism more understanding and tolerant. I was on a business trip in Suzhou these two days, and he happened to be on a roadshow at Suyi Cinema with Liu Haoran. In fact, I think he should sit down and have a deep chat with everyone about "Decryption", talk about his experience, lessons and even troubles, which must be of great value to the future creation and development of Chinese films.