If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Fun premise, good actors, bad writing. This film seemed to have potential at the beginning but it quickly devolves into a trite action film. Ultimately it's very boring.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

I decided to watch this documentary because it describes an event that I was too young (at the time) to appreciate...the first competitive chess match(es) between a human player--Garry Kasparov--and a machine--IBM's Deep Blue. Sadly, this take on the subject plays more like an independent student film or something, providing little substance and even less drama on a subject that could have had both.The problem with this documentary is that it breaks what is basically the cardinal rule of documentaries: it somehow manages to make its subject even LESS exciting than the events that actually took place. It provides very little context to the events, and even the context it does provide just bogs down the real-life story. I compare this type of documentary to "King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters" (which was vastly better). That doc takes two people playing a video game (not even really against each other) and turns it into an epic drama while delving into the history of the experience. Neither of those approaches show up in "Game Over".Sadly, this was a very disappointing experience. I had been quite excited to view this documentary, and I could tell right away that is was not going to be the quality that I had expected. I'll give it two stars because the idea/event behind is truly something interesting, but not a cent more. This subject deserves a much more professional treatment, that is for certain.

I should first point out that I'm just a couple of ear hairs past novice level when it comes to chess, so I'm not a complete outsider to the subject at hand...just on the periphery. But I digress."Game Over" isn't a documentary so much as a position paper, the kind that an insecure college freshman with a chip on his shoulder would write for a first semester English class. (I should know.) There's tantalizing material here that the director, like a bad chess player, doesn't follow up on because he's fixated on other stuff that's more immediately gratifying. Mainly attacks.I'll get this out of the way now: the film is unapologetically biased. The director's reverential attitude toward Garry Kasparov and contempt for the IBM team comes through loud and clear in just about every frame. There is no ambiguity--no real ambiguity, just the "you decide" kind that's so common in those paranormal-themed TV shows on the Discovery Channel where you just know what *they* think the truth is. The film takes Kasparov's assertions at face value: *of course* IBM must have had human hands behind the scenes helping Deep Blue; they had to have been playing mind games to break him; naturally they wouldn't let him look at the logs--something fishy's going on! When the IBM boffins get the camera, every single one is made to look like an arrogant, lying sum'bitch. The conspiracy angle is played up and up, bolstered by the now well-noted creepy (and very annoying) whispering and cutaways to The Turk. Our director (no, I don't remember his name and would be too impatient to keep typing it) doesn't let up on hammering his point into our heads, and certainly doesn't provide us with sufficient material to truly make up our own minds about What Really Happened. I won't take sides on that subject, other than to say that nowadays the idea of a computer trouncing a top Grandmaster certainly doesn't seem very controversial to me, although at the time I can understand how Kasparov could have gotten freaked.So what we have here could have been a good hour or so program on one of those cable channels that specializes in nonfiction programming. Yes, I'm sure they could have pruned it down into a much tighter picture if they'd just lost all the superfluous Turk and eerie-corridor shots, not to mention annoying commentary from Kasparov's manager and others.But that's not what's really fascinating in this movie. Even without the kooky paranoia angle (except that which comes straight from Kasparov) we have a very compelling human drama waiting to be explored: man vs machine; man vs corporation; man vs his own ego, reputation, and past. Kasparov is an engaging and complex figure, cocky at the beginning, perplexed and frantic in the middle, and vulnerable and all too human at the end. The unbeatable met his match and it changed him irrevocably; the story of Kasparov vs Deep Blue is classic tragedy. Even the programming team didn't get to gloat. I would have liked to hear more about why, in the words of the lead Asian programmer, "it sucked".But villains don't get to tell their side of the story, and I doubt our director knew that he had a classic tragedy to tell, or even what tragedy is. (I also don't get much sense that he knows much about chess itself either.) In his hands, it's just plain old melodrama--based, as they say on TV, on a true story. Good guys, bad guys, and a lot of padding. I basically would have preferred if Kasparov and the IBM people would have just been allowed to tell their stories in their own way, they're clearly interesting enough subjects without the "help" of the director's editorializing...but WITH the help of position diagrams, commentary on the games themselves from chess masters, etc. That might have given even lay viewers some context, an appreciation of the deeply complex analysis over which gray matter grappled with silicon.It's reasonably well-made, though, from a technical standpoint. There's some nice camera-work and editing too, just not enough, and at the same time too much. Ponder what "Game Over" (no subtitle) would have looked like in the hands of, say, Frederick Wiseman. Just as an experiment.

Man Vs. Machine. The human mind takes on a computer, and fails. As we see, all men succumb to paranoia, stress, confidence and so on. But is everything as it seems? Kasparov certainly presents an interesting case, but given the times, it's only natural we all hate the big company. Sure, it's suspicious that he never got a rematch. That things were kept locked behind closed doors etc. Kasparov clearly has a love for the game, and shows himself to be better than any computer by granting a rematch to his rival from many years before. Unfortunately, the director clearly has a bias and isn't very subtle about it. When the journalist talks about his article, he is shot from a high angle, half-lit and very shadowy. He is the only person shot like this. Making it kind of humorous, but also unfair. It's a great story, and Kasparov has nothing to be ashamed of. After all, he was beaten by just a single game, and the computer took many programmers etc. Certainly sparked my interest in chess.

I saw the documentary, and saw the actual games in 1997.Kasparov could surely be a fine actor, since the guy is very expressive and charismatic.Whenever he felt good and winning, you could see it. And when he was losing and crumbling, you could see it too. Was way obvious. Like the documentary say, Kasparov would be the worst poker player in the world.Now, did IBM cheat?Who knows. Anything is possibleArguments against it: Kasparov could've taken for granted Deep Blue's playing antics as the one of a normal computer, and since IBM had a grandmaster chess player advising the programmers, it's not so wild to conceive that they managed to program Deep Blue to be able to spot traps like the one Kasparov set up that wouldv'e nailed any other computer. And he's a paranoid (coming from the U.R.S.S. no one can blame him), since chess is also psychologic warfare, IBM surely did it's best to psyche out Kasparov and play his paranoid assumptions.Arguments for it: Kasparov won fist game easy, but lost second when Deep Blue didn't take a bait a compute would've taken. Maybe losing the first game was intended to lower Kasparov's defenses so he would try a play like that, and there Deep Blue would surprise him, psyche him out and steamroll. But that's a human strategy, not a machine's (the computer only knows the game in front of it, doesn't know there are six games total, so it would NEVER sacrifice one to try to surprise Kasparov in the next one).Also IBM,s attitude, while could be attributed to psyching out Kasparov (fueling his paranoia), looked totally like a cheater's conduct. Also when they won (no rematch, no further research, dismantling of Deep Blue) doesn't look like honest behavior (first truly artificial intelligence? Who would NOT follow through with research?), but like a cheater who won and now has to skip town before he's discovered.And, the final nail: Why shouldn't IBM cheat? To IBM, it's nothing but a marketing stunt, nothing else. The whole point was not to beat Kasparov or improve artificial intelligence (or they would've continued the work on Deep Blue, published the groundbreaking work, patented programming code, etc), but only to improve stock value and reposition themselves on the market. So why not cheat if necessary? Like a company would be above that (Enron, etc.) or anything for that matter to increase profit.But since there's no way to verify what Deep Blue did (thanks to IBM, like e-voting paperless machines, "trust us"), we'll never know...