Directed by Vikram Jayanti. (G) 88 min. Opens Mar 4.
Russian Grandmaster Garry Kasparov, arguably the greatest chess
player ever, was defeated in a six-game match in 1997 by the IBM
super-computer Deep Blue. Or was he? Vikram Jayanti's documentary
posits that Kasparov was actually the victim of a conspiracy,
engineered by profit-hungry IBM executives and programmers, that saw an
unknown flesh-and-blood chess whiz intervene at key moments to lend the
computer's game some human touch. It's a tantalizing thesis, but the
problem with Game Over is that it doesn't even come close to proving it.
Instead,
the film resorts to hokey TV-exposé devices like flash cuts, spooky
music and heaping piles of conjecture, interweaving present-day footage
of Kasparov (who suffered a crisis of professional nerve in the years
after his loss and was upset for his world chess title) and the other
principals in the man vs. machine summit series with clips of the
actual match. Director Jayanti is obviously taken with Kasparov as a
subject, and for good reason: he's too arrogant to be appealing but the
glimmers of scared uncertainty that peek out from behind his imperious
bearing are fascinating. His accusations of tampering seem groundless,
however, even if the Deep Blue team -- who are scarcely able, six years
later, to contain their glee at toppling the great Kasparov -- come off
as bullying jerks.
Game Over is peppered with clips from the 1927 silent film
The Chess Player, which
tells the story of the 18th-century chess-playing automaton, "The
Turk," revealed at that's movie's climax to be a ruse. Jayanti's film
labours -- and fails -- to provide a comparable "gotcha" moment. It's
the journalistic equivalent of the chess position known as perpetual
check, in which the opponent is perpetually on the ropes but the
killing blow never comes, resulting in a mandatory draw. It's better
than Kasparov managed against the machine, perhaps, but
Game Over still falls well short of triumph.