The Imitation Game 2014
This was a movie I had heard good things about, one of two dramas in 2014 about British scientists, the other being The Theory of Everything about Stephen Hawking. While I enjoyed that other movie, my hopes were higher for this movie about Alan Turing, a computer pioneer who helped crack German codes in World War II. The whole story of Bletchley Park and the codebreaking effort centered there is amazing, the equivalent of America’s Manhattan Project. Then there is the tragedy that Alan Turing’s homosexuality was eventually found out by the British police and he was sentenced to either jail or something called “chemical castration,” drugs that would prevent him from acting on his homosexual impulses. A few years after he was found out, this national hero committed suicide. Except that he wasn’t necessarily a national hero because everything he did to help win the war was still highly classified, so nobody really knew.
So The Imitiation Game is that story and it sounds great. And the movie is actually quite good. As someone with some interest in Germany’s famed code machine, Enigma, and the efforts to crack it, and also someone with some interest in the history of computers, I had a little bit of knowledge about this subject. However, I also have to admit that any time I learn about the details of the machine and codebreaking, it starts going over my head and eventually I am lost. Add to this that there were all kinds of variations of Enigma, plus it wasn’t Germany’s only code machine that had to be cracked. And on top of that there were Japanese codes too. So really the whole thing is far bigger and more complex than cracking one coding machine.
But not in this movie. In this movie it is all about cracking Enigma and a lot of the basic parts of the story are true. Added into this are the portrayal of Alan Turing by Benedict Cumberbatch, and really outstanding performances by everyone in the cast. It would have been easy to gloss over some of the details, ignore the homosexuality angle, or make Turing out to be too much of a hero. Instead we see real people with flaws struggling towards a common goal. I really enjoyed it.
After watching I read more about Alan Turing and found out that almost everything in the movie except those few basics I had some grasp of was completely made up. It is more of a piece of historical fiction than anything. Still, I really did enjoy the movie, so I will give it an A- (because some things in the movie just didn’t make sense to me and it turns out that is because they were not true). And while I think the movie does a disservice to a number of people in the movie, including Turing, who is portrayed as someone on the autism spectrum who didn’t get along with others and was generally disliked, I also really enjoyed finding out where the movie was wrong, getting a frame of reference from the movie, which I could then fill in with actual facts. Worse, the Blu-ray includes a “Making of” feature which continues so many of the lies in the movie, including that Turing committed suicide because of the chemical castration, when in fact the suicide took place over a year after he stopped taking the drugs. Further, the chemical castration didn’t cause him tremors that prevented him from working, but was just the hormone estrogen which is taken voluntarily today by men with gender issues who want to be more like women. I won’t let any of the dramatic license affect my score, but I do think the scale of that license is staggering and seems entirely unnnecessary, though the true story of a huge team effort with continuously evolving success would not be as dramatic as the story in the movie. And I also feel like there should have been a bonus feature on the disk about the real story rather than just supporting a largely fictional movie as if it all happened just that way.
Written: 13 Mar 2017
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital