I watched The Imitation Game last night. No one at the time other than a small number of people (due to being classified) and few today realize just how important breaking the Germans “unbreakable” enigma code was to the war. Had they not broken that code, at the very least, the war would have lasted years longer and killed millions more to the loss of that war itself as a possibility.
One of the greatest minds of his time, mathematician Alan Turing cracked the enigma code. Turing’s ideas still impact a number of important areas today and he was way ahead of his time and a truly remarkable person. The movie does a nice job of balancing the technical importance of the essential matter of breaking the code with the personal life of Turing, who’s life was essentially destroyed because he was gay, which was literally illegal in England at that time. The movie also illustrates the extreme suppression of women at the time and seems to fancy itself not just a spy thriller genre but social justice champion, the latter of which gets overly heavy handed toward the end. I think simply showing us what it was like for them at the time, vs beating the viewer over the head at the end with text that seemed very out of place to the central theme of the movie, would have been more effective.
The acting by Benedict Cumberbatch (who’s proving to be a very dynamic actor) and cast is top tier and is what makes the movie above your average movie of the ilk.
PS: The Germans on the front lines did realize the code had been broken and tried to convince their bosses it had been broken but good old German arrogance, refused to believe their “unbreakable” had indeed been broken. It’s a good thing the German high command was so damn arrogant. It cost them dearly. The movie makes no mention of this and I think at least a few scenes from the German side could have really done justice to this otherwise very good movie.
I thought it was incredibly boring and I really did not enjoy it. Cumberbatch plays the same role in every film he’s in, he has no depth to his acting and he gets hard to watch for more than ten minutes. Knightly is equally as terrible IMO. For a film about such a vital and important part of history, I feel the story really deserved a better film.
I saw it last week and I enjoyed it as well. Turing was certainly a brilliant individual and I imagine it could be a very lonely existence when functioning on such a intellectual level.
Watched it last week and I’ll be honest, I’m pretty well versed on WWII clandestine services and I had never heard of Alan Turing before the film. Talk about a man ahead of his time! The father of computers no less.
I look at it as a historical drama, pretty on point and well executed. Any WWII buff should watch this film.
The only word I can use to describe Dr. Turing’s fate is barbaric. As humans we really are our own worst enemy.
Enigma was initially cracked by a team of Poles led by Marian Rejewski in the 1930s. When Poland was overrun, they shared with Brits, who later shared with US.
While the Poles had found weaknesses in the system, there was still a lot of manual work to decrypt a single message, and allies were overwhelmed trying this. They were basically using handheld techniques like most folks use to crack the puzzles in newspapers.
Turing’s contribution was to automate this process with a general purpose machine that could recover the rotor settings and allow an easy decryption of any of the day’s messages.
tl;dr:
Poles cracked Enigma, Turing automated the process.
The Poles cracked an earlier Enigma, but once more rotors and settings were added their methods became entirely impractical. The British did use their initial work as a basis for their own though.
There were no homo scenes at the school. Only scene that even suggested they might be was when he decrypted his friend’s note that said; “I love you”. No swapping spit or any of that.
In the film MI6 did divulge they got their Enigma machine from the Polish Resistance. However that was all that was mentioned about them. Good to know they were on to breaking it prior to Turing’s team.
Very enjoyable flick. I didn’t mind the (sort of made up, sort of true) end because I knew that was the price of getting a movie made about such an esoteric subject.
I just saw an Enigma machine at the Imperial War Museum. Awesomeness.
I imagine it could be a very lonely existence when functioning on such a intellectual level.
I thought it was an excellent movie, I guess they had to emphasize the gay aspect to get the movie made. It bothered me that they had to do that, I don’t like politics in my movies. Not that it wasn’t legitimately part of his story, but that they almost made his sexuality more important than the brilliance of his invention and the thousands of lives they saved. Anyway, I thought it was a great movie overall. Maybe not historically accurate, but a good movie is seldom based on absolute truth.
You’d be surprise to find out the opposite was true. It’s an independent film that none of the major studios would touch. I thought that was weird myself. I watched a documentary on the film and the life of Turing interviewing the cast, authors of several books on him, and the screen play writer. The writer and one of the films producers are gay so Alan Turing was kind of a childhood hero to them. The writer is a big tech geek so he looks up to guys like Turing like most kids would look up to Babe Ruth or Michael Jordan.
I hear you but to ignore him being gay would be a disservice. Here’s a guy who both helped win the war and came up with the basis for modern computers, who was later ostracized and marginalized solely due to his homosexuality. Lost his clearance (and therefore his job), chemically castrated, and received no public recognition until far after his death.
If that’s not part of the tragedy of his tale, nothing is.
Agreed, his sexual orientation was not just peripheral to the story, but a national disgrace, and I thought the director did a god job of balancing the historical aspects of his contributions to the war effort (he saved millions of lives at the very least) and the obvious social/cultural aspects of his life and his end, essential to the story. He was a national, more like an international hero in every sense of the word, and that’s what he got for his efforts. Poor SOB.
