siderite
As chess documentary go, this one is pretty good, even if far from being unbiased. Rather, it is biased both ways, trying to show both sides of the story, but throwing in enough innuendo to make it all seem either a terrible corporate conspiracy or an obstinate refusal to accept defeat from Garry Kasparov. Riddled with scenes from the 1927 film "Le joueur d'échecs", about The Turk, the wondrous mechanical chess player that turned out to be human operated, it doesn't take much to know which direction the film leaned towards.But if you ignore the dramatization, the film is quite filled with interesting information. It is great to see Kasparov explain how the computer strategy is different from a human player's and how the exponential nature of the calculations don't render themselves well to following a long term plan.What I didn't like is that it is not so much about chess itself. The games are not shown, no moves, no knowledge of the game is required in order to watch it. But, as documentaries go, this one was above average and I have to recognize it as such.
petrelet
I'm writing this note as a chess player as well as as a movie viewer. I watched the 1997 Kasparov-Deep Blue games on the Internet. I know something about the issues that were raised. Other chess players will come along and want to know whether this movie is worth seeing/buying, and I'm talking largely to them. However, I'll try not to ignore those who aren't "into chess".This movie is about the 1997 match between Garry Kasparov and the custom-built computer "Deep Blue". However, the first image you see in the movie is not of Kasparov, or of the computer, but of "THE TURK". This is an "automaton" which was built in Europe at the turn of the 18th-19th century and played winning chess against all comers. I put the word "automaton" in quotes because it was, as everyone now knows, a fake. There was a man inside it.If you don't like seeing "THE TURK", then you won't be able to stand the movie, because "THE TURK" has as much screen time as Kasparov, maybe more, both in modern footage and in b/w footage from some old movie. The reappearance of "THE TURK" every few seconds underscores Kasparov's charge that "Deep Blue" had human assistance - that it was (to some degree) a fake computer, that IBM cheated, that there was "a man inside it" working behind the scenes to help it win. Not only does Kasparov believe this, but the filmmakers seem to believe it too. And so this is not really much of a movie about chess games or about programming chess computers. It is a propaganda piece about a big corporation supposedly misusing a helpless grandmaster. Really it is a lot like a "negative campaign ad", as it is chock full of ominous music and evocative camera work and spooky sound effects and innuendos ("we never found out what was behind that locked door") and the ever-present "TURK".Now, most people in the chess community are pretty much convinced that IBM did not cheat and that this was Garry's paranoia at work. To start with, in order for a human to help "Deep Blue" beat Kasparov, it would seem that you would need a human who was better than "Deep Blue" AND better than Kasparov. Since there was no such person, the whole idea is a bit suspect from the start. Furthermore, by the time this movie was made, there were computer programs that could run on your PC that could beat strong grandmasters. Today, much more than in 1997, we take it for granted that a computer can do things you might not expect. And we are less likely to take it as a monumental human tragedy that a computer beat a guy in chess. (And in fact, the bottom line is that Kasparov beat himself with two bad mistakes, including resigning game 2 in a drawn position.) As for the chess games, you actually see very little of them. There are a few comments from masters and commentators that tell briefly how they went, but really you don't get to see hardly any of the strategy or tactics at all. Naturally as a chess player I take this as a major shortcoming, but I think that non-players are being cheated too. Imagine a baseball movie, for example, where you don't hardly get to see any of the game - just a commentator telling you that "in Game Four, the White Sox defeated the Astros with such and such a score." Nobody would make a movie like that. But here, for example, we are told that Kasparov made a bad blunder in the opening of the decisive game 6, but we aren't shown the position on the screen, or told why it was a blunder, or what he should have done instead, or anything. We just see a few seconds of Kasparov holding his head in his hands, and then more atmospheric sound effects and camera work.(Since I saw this on DVD, let me warn chess players about the DVD as well. The jacket promises you that the Extras include the games "with analysis". Is this grandmaster analysis, which people like us might find interesting? NO! It is the automated computer voice synthesizer analysis from some version of Chessmaster, that tells you when a piece is attacked and a pawn gets isolated and that you are in the "Caro-Kann Defense, Main Line". Blahhhh.) Someone might then come along and say, "Well, clearly this movie is meant to dramatize the match for the non-player, and so it's unfair to be impatient with it." But actually it doesn't do a very good job of reaching out to the non-player either - it skates over some points that a true novice would really want to have explained. For example it says that Kasparov could have gotten "perpetual check" in the second game, but it doesn't explain what that is (or show what it would have looked like on the board, which would have been interesting). It flashes back to the Kasparov-Karpov matches but doesn't explain why there were two of them or who organized them etc. I didn't need this information myself, but I'm familiar with it. If you don't already have chess experience, there are places where you are going to be confused, and this is just a defect in the film.Ultimately I can't recommend the movie, which, like "THE TURK" itself, is not what it purports to be (a documentary) but more of a stage illusion.
bergen_aeon
I just watched this movie about a week ago. I still recall back in 1997 when Kasparov lost the series of games against Deep Blue. I was about 20 years old. What became very fascinating was, not that the man lost a battle against machine, but the fact that Deep Blue never showed up again. I never saw any other match, or a new chip was built using that programing knowledge. Nothing. 7 years later am confronted by a great documentary, that answers me why i never saw the blue again. I'm a filmmaker as well, and beating the crap out of IBM the way this film does, is anything buy easy. Very well documented, the storytelling is good and the way the camera moves along with the state of mind of the interviewers is just superb.For those who still think America has anything good and noble to give, this film shows that Enron and the Iraq War are just the other side of the same coin, the truth that movies like Farenheid 9/11 and this one bravely toss in our faces. Nothing, and as you can see in this film, nothing in America happens because so.
