Gordon5136 The first 3/4 of this low-budget film may appeal to mathematics and computer science nerds, but to an outsider, it is mainly a bunch of mathematicians standing/sitting around talking their specialized vernacular about some important mathematical breakthrough that could have astounding impact on humanity. As storytelling techniques go, this one was weak in my opinion: it didn't seem very well written and directed. I'm not just saying that just because there was no action at all—just dialogue. I'm saying there were a number of weaknesses: there was no hook to make me want to watch the whole thing (I had to force myself to stay with it), and there was no significant character arc to it. In fact I wasn't really sure who the protagonist was and who the antagonist was. I have to presume they were respectively all the mathematicians on the team versus the government. The actors were good and did their best to not let the film completely implode from countless blasé pages of script.I gather these persons recruited to work on the project must have felt somewhat akin to what the Manhattan Project team felt: excited, optimistic and patriotic about their objectives at first, but later pondering what hell they might very well be unleashing on the world. Toward the end of the film, it starts to get a little interesting and tense—a little! The implications and the risks of success become a little more apparent. But I had to force myself to wade through about an hour of boring static scenes filled with meaningless (to myself, as a non-mathematician) and seemingly endless lingo. Not really very interesting or compelling overall. I forced myself to watch the whole thing, hoping there would be an astonishing climax. It's not one of those "I want eighty minutes of my life back" films, but none-the-less, I cannot recommend it to friends as a good movie to watch.

richardlr65 Some of this is so current that I don't see how it got in when the movie was made. All of the premises and implications are not included but that is irrelevant to the film. If you don't consider the future dystopian, the consequences of this topic, the singularity (should it happen) and the intelligence explosion (should it occur if the singularity occurs), a completely different world for humans is not that far away. In 100 years we may be as intellectually different from now as we are from our million year past ancestors. The evolution into a new species (Kurzweil).From a dystopian viewpoint it would either be the end of our species or a setback of our civilizations by centuries.I've been listening to "end of the world stuff" all my life. I grew up during the intensifying cold war. I was born the year the Soviets detonated their first nuclear weapon and the "duck and cover" stuff started. In any case, my point of view is as at least non-dystopian if not utopian.

Jeremy Kun As a graduate student in the field of theoretical computer science, I feel that I understand P vs NP as well as the makers of this film could hope for any viewer to understand them. I felt the treatment was more technically accurate than almost any movie I have seen about a mathematical topic, but it still fell short on a few key moments.Warning, the following contains spoilers.First, I was confused when they mentioned PSPACE in a few parts of the film. It made it sound like not only had they proved P = NP, but the main character had proved P = PSPACE, and was using this as his back door algorithm. I don't think this was the intent of the movie, but in any case it was a bit confusing. A second scene puts the main character in his office with a student and his colleague, and he mentions that he has an algorithm that goes on proving theorems and proving more theorems. It is a well known consequence of P = NP that finding mathematical proofs become trivial, for there is an obvious algorithm to check a purported proof in polynomial time. The world's most renowned mathematicians would have known this as well, and it doesn't make sense that it would occur as some kind of "revelation" to the main character and remain a secret he could use as leverage.Finally, I felt that some of the phrases used to describe general things (like the field of research, which is theoretical computer science or TCS) made the dialog a bit awkward. That being said, the movie had absolutely palpable dramatic tension. The lines were witty and sharp, the acting was very believable (and the characters actually had distinct personalities). Their power struggles were very exciting to watch. The color was also very well balanced. None of the Hollywood teal and orange crap that has become so standard and ugly.In all, I enjoyed the movie and the fact that it gave serious consideration to the most important problem in my field (and treated it fairly). My main criticism is that the plot should have more direct clarity. It's nice to leave a lot up to implication. But mathematicians are rarely indirect, and the best lines of the movie were the pointed, thought provoking comment.

vdmsss This film is about a four theoretical computer scientists who have just proved the conjecture P=NP in the context of a classified research project funded by NSA, DHS and the like. Such a discovery (which incidentally and just to pacify you is not believed possible) would have an enormous impact on our current digital world, in particular would make cryptography breakable and -therefore- terminally undermine the very foundations of any form of security and privacy on the Internet. The entire spectrum of consequences is hard to predict and, surely, in "capable" hands such knowledge would be quite a powerful weapon. This is rendered well in the film, as is the ensuing conscience struggle for the scientist: to comply with the government's demand of absolute silence, or make the result public at the risk of being branded as traitors? When (s)he says that this film attempts to present a certain "travelling salesman problem" as if everything else depended on it, I suggest user "qqwe qweetr" does not understand what (s)he is talking about. Indeed the situation depicted by the film is plausible, even possible (though extremely unlikely), the screenplay and the dialogues are competent, and the whole package is intriguing if you understand the context. Given that, the film is not a particular good piece of cinema, sounds a lot like a theatrical piece, and surely most details (and therefore of the plot) will go over the head of the typical viewer. However, for a film made with $10,000 this is quite an achievement. Chapeau!