I'm currently listening to Xzibit's Man vs. Machine album (which features two songs from the DOMINO soundtrack!), so it seems appropriate to talk about a great little doc I saw a few days ago entitled GAME OVER: KASPAROV AND THE MACHINE.
And while Russian chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov is no Xzibit, he's still a compelling figure who makes for a great documentary.
The film traces Kasparov's rise from Azerbaijani boy genius to "the greatest player in the history of chess", but it's primarily interested in Kasparov's highly publicized loss to Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer that defeated him in 1997. I remember hearing something about it when I was in elementary school, and about how this was basically the beginning of Skynet, but I didn't pay a lot of attention to it. I sucked at chess. The school computers beat me all the time, and I had learned long ago that they were much smarter than me. I had long ago accepted that it was a matter of time before a muscle-coated exoskeleton knocked on my door, asked "Brandon Forsyth?", and blew me away with a double-barreled shotgun. Some Russian guy losing a chess game to a computer didn't seem to be a big deal.
Popping the film in, I was worried that this was going to be a dry, "Then Deep Blue moved a rook to C6" recreation of the match, but I needn't have worried. This is a film rooted in conspiracy film conventions, as Kasparov attempts to persuade us that IBM rigged the match and used human tampering to prevent it from falling into predictable patterns. There's a great whispered voice-over that opens the film talking about how IBM's stock rose rapidly after their defeat of Kasparov, and this perfectly sets up the tone of the film. There's a lot of camera flashes, tilted angles, and brooding close-ups of darting eyes, and the film succeeds at making these matches an exhilarating showdown of maneuvers on and off the board, with plenty of behind-the-scenes intrigue.
Occasionally the film reaches a little too far, especially in finding ways to dramatize the events, with a lot of repeated footage and the same set of stylized tricks. There's only so many times that a lingering shot on Deep Blue's unfeeling eye cut against Kasparov's eyes staring back can express something about the match. There's also an ill-advised attempt to tie in footage of The Turk, a chess-playing automaton from the 1800s that was revealed as a human-operated hoax.
There's not a lot of actual evidence presented to support Kasparov's claims, other than the fact that he crushed Deep Blue in the first match before drawing or losing the next five, but the film actually becomes more about paranoia and ego than about if the match was rigged. It's clear to see that Kasparov truly cannot believe that the computer beat him, and it's fascinating watching such a methodical mind unravel on camera. He simply cannot accept even the possibility that the computer beat him, and his search for answers provides a fascinating commentary on the man vs. machine conflict that drives the film. The frailty of the human mind and our self-limitations are what the film is actually concerned with. It's stressed several times that Kasparov defeated himself, with people describing the final match as "a mental breakdown" and "implosion".
GAME OVER: KASPAROV AND THE MACHINE is a fascinating document about how even the smartest human mind is limited by its humanity. Oh, and Kasparov should totally listen to the Dr. Dre song "What's the Difference" featuring Xzibit. I think he'd like it.
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