The Imitation Game

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source: The Imitation Game

This film, while entertaining, aims mainly to be a purely twenty-first century anti-bullying parable, regardless of the historical truth about Alan Turing. While I have been more firmly opposed than most to boarding school bullying, in this case, the nobler the goal, the worse the writing. The film tries unsuccessfully to make Turing both a friendless quasi-autistic lone genius, and the head of the entire decryption project; neither point has any relation to reality, and barely cohere to each other. (I admit to some bitterness about this slur on my grand- supervisor, since it implicitly denies the existence of my graduate-school supervisor.) The film also does disservice to Joan Clarke's genuine contributions, substituting a muddled and completely ahistorical subplot about her professional dependence on, and mathematical superiority to, Turing, while seeming more concerned with her appearance than her intellect.

I really enjoyed watching the movie, however left the cinema disappointed! Fantastic story, great Alan Turing - pioneer of computer science. BUT - German military texts enciphered on the Enigma machine were first broken by the Polish Cipher Bureau, beginning in December 1932. This success was a result of efforts by three Polish cryptologists, Marian Rejewski, Jerzy Różycki and Henryk Zygalski, working for Polish military intelligence. Alan devised a number of techniques for breaking German ciphers, including improvements to the pre-war Polish bombe method. Shame Polish Intelligence was omitted in the movie.

This film is supposedly based on the life of Alan Turing (adapted from a biography of his life.) A pioneer in computer science, mathematician and cryptologist. During the war Turing was part of a team involved in breaking the Enigma Code. The character of Alan Turing tends to pop up in other novels and films usually in the periphery such as the Robert Harris fictional novel Enigma. The real Alan Turing's story had a tragic ending as he was arrested for homosexuality in the 1950s when it was illegal and he committed suicide. Over the years pressure have been placed to rehabilitate Turing's name. There is a road in Manchester named after him, his work in the field of computers and code-breaking in World War 2 eventually led to a posthumous pardon. The Imitation Game cast Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing and right from the early scenes we see our modern day Sherlock playing a genius like he was another Sherlock Holmes. Clever, insufferable, a loner, arrogant. I thought I would let that slide but the script which won the best adapted screenplay Oscar was I am afraid a ham-fisted clunker. It was determined to make the story uninteresting, dull and blah blah blah predictable. It is also probably far away from the actual true story. Just when you thought it was getting better it goes back to its default bad mode. For example when they do crack the code, the team start fighting and arguing and then one of them has a brother who just happens to be on a ship in the Atlantic which might get attacked. Then there is the communist double agent, but hold on there was a double agent in the fictional novel Enigma. It looks like that was added for dramatic effect. Then there is the ludicrous scene where the Commander and his cronies forcibly start to attack the code breaking machine having no idea what it does and wants to go back to manual code breaking when we have been already told that would take millions of years to succeed. It might had helped if it was explained to the audience how the code breaking machine worked. The real Turing also had a stutter which in this film is portrayed as being very mild. I much prefer Derek Jacobi's interpretation of Turing in the play and film, Breaking the Code where the stutter was more pronounced. The film is just clichéd rubbish and I was genuinely disappointed as to how poor it was. It got nominated for a Best Picture Oscar which is very much undeserved.