Here’s a thread to post your reviews of The Imitation Game. I’ve seen some very favorable reviews so far, some likening it to this year’s The King’s Speech, so I plan on seeing it.
I’d like Doper reviews too, though. What did you think?
We saw it this morning, and loved it. I knew some of the story, but was fascinated about all that they showed. Benedict Cumberbatch was amazing.
It was so hard to watch as Alan Turing went through life not really being able to connect. And the English public school bullying was everything I’ve heard.
I saw it a few weeks ago a the AFI European film festival. I really enjoyed it. I thought Cumberbatch did a really great job. Really shows how badly people suffered for being who they are.
Just saw it. Good awareness building about a gay guy who saved 14 million people and two years of war and got completely fucked over by the government and queen/king because gay. Chemical castration and suicide. Pretty fucking typical shit for gay people. I hope lots of people see it.
Whatever happened with the soviet guy?
Mark Strong was great as Gen. Menzies, as was Rory Kinnear as the detective and oh what the heck, they were all good.
Okay, thinking a bit more, I do think the movie was bit Disneyfied. A lot of the supporting cast is portrayed as being, well… supportive. I call bullshit on that a bit. Most of those characters wouldn’t have been as supportive and understanding as they’re portrayed. Gay people don’t kill themselves because they have lots of secretly cool and supportive friends and coworkers. They kill themselves because they have none of that.
The film left the question of Turing’s suicide a little bit open with the scene of cyanide being spilled on the carpet. It was interesting that the characterization they chose seemed to place him on the autistic spectrum. I’ve never heard Turing described that way.
I did have a problem with how they put the idea of looking for repeated words in the messages as the “breakthrough”. That seems like Codebreaking 101, although I suppose it is necessary when making a film for people unfamiliar with the entire field.
It left me feeling very sad about the consequences of intolerance of difference.
I didn’t think Turing had particularly supportive coworkers. One , the Soviet spy, blackmailed him. Others bullied him at first until they began to respect his ability. Then there was the shady MI6 boss who Turing didn’t trust and the authoritarian military bully. Only Joan counted as a real friend, and maybe Matthew Goodes character in the end. And then they all had to separate after the war and he went back to being completely isolated.
Apparently they cut a scene of his suicide from the film. Apparently the effects of the chemical castration were terrible on his intellect aa well as sexuality. Must have left him wondering what was left.
Here’s an article on the accuracy of The Imitation Game:
Turing’s colleagues at Bletchley Park mostly knew that he was gay, so actually they were more supportive in reality than in the movie. He never worked with the guy who was a Soviet spy and probably never knew him. Turing in the movie comes across as more autistic than Turing actually was. Most of the more dramatic scenes in the movie were just made up, just as in most movies based on a true story. The movie makes it look like Turing was mostly responsible for building the “bombe,” but in fact his contribution was one among many. Joan Clarke accepted Turing’s homosexuality, and it had nothing to do with why Turing eventually broke it off. As is usual in films, Knightley is wildly better-looking than Clarke was, and Cumberbatch is better-looking than Turing.
So I’m not going to go through your comments one by one to correct the errors, but a lot of them aren’t accurate. Read the article in the link above for a brief account of the true events. Read the book Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges for a long account.
More about the accuracy:
Tastes differ, of course. I think Turing looks just fine and Cumberbatch is kind of funny looking.
The movie is a horror story, with an appalling variety of horrors depicted. Even the triumph of the codebreaking is diminished by all the horrors associated with it, and the subsequent need never to admit to triumph. Sometimes you wonder whether people are worth saving.
As a movie, I suppose that kind of realization is about all you can ask. It’s engrossing, and moving, and tackles big issues. It’s well-done and well-acted.
The “but…” is that every biopic oversimplifies the world to near-nonsense. Turing did not win WWII all by himself. Why even bother giving him a team if they were cardboard cutouts of personalities? There was so much more they could have said about Turing and Bletchley that would have deepened the film past a series of cliched set-pieces. Can anyone imagine from this film that Turing went to America during the war and managed to fool our military into thinking that the British hadn’t made any progress, while he made off with our technology and got necessary advice about computers from Claude Shannon? The autistic idiot savant depicted here couldn’t possibly have achieved that.
One of the reasons that TV series have been praised over movies is that they allow characters to be complex. This is certainly one of the better movies I’ve seen this year, yet it could have been far better with slight alterations. (The hour of him tediously failing could easily have been cut, because it never actually happened.)
To be fair, I think that every movie I see could be better if they made it my way. But it’s one thing for Guardians of the Galaxy to be a series of cliches and far more disappointing that a biography of Alan Turing is.
I saw the movie tonight, and liked it very much. Great cast and a very gripping story. Cumberpatch and Knightley should be up for Oscars.
Some good TIG trivia from IMDb.com: The Imitation Game (2014) - Trivia - IMDb. My favorite bit:
*In its review of the film, *The New York Times has indicated a parental warning for “advanced mathematics.” The complete notice reads, ““The Imitation Game” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). Illicit sex, cataclysmic violence and advanced math, most of it mentioned rather than shown.”
I saw it today. It’s a good movie if you want to see the pain of homosexual derision. It’s a poor movie if you want to see a history of Turing or Enigma. It’s always the problem of seeing a movie “based on” events that you are familiar with.
I’m glad that the public is being made aware of Alan Turing. He’s an important historical figure who most people didn’t know about until recently. I’m also happy that people are learning about how horribly he and other gays were treated.
However, I thought most of the crises as shown in the movie were phony. That is, they were in the plot only because they needed to create dramatic tension, not because of any basis in fact. For example,
[SPOILER]The business where Commander Denniston is prevented from shutting down the project by the threats of all of Turing’s colleagues to resign came across to me as a Hollywood contrivance.
Another example: the scene where the team decodes the first message and learns that Hilton’s brother is about to die in a U-Boat attack seemed fake to me. I know the point they were trying to make - that in war it is sometimes necessary to let bad things happen in order to keep the enemy from learning that their code has been broken. I don’t think it was necessary to invent such a coincidence to get this point across.
[/SPOILER]
Because of this, I give the movie a marginal thumbs up. I’d be more enthusiastic if I thought the film were better-written.
I thought the information transfer was in the other direction. Turing didn’t go to the US until 1943, after all.
John Cairncross was identified as a Soviet spy by 1951 at the latest, confessed on several occasions, but was never prosecuted. As noted above, he almost certainly never met Turing.
While some aspects of the film, notably the production design work on the bombes and the huts, is impressive, we really could be here all day pointing out the factual errors. The use of real names aside, essentially everything about Bletchley in the script ought to be taken as fictitious.
Two overall aspects of the project however struck me as more generally bothersome. The first is the way the filmmakers are promoting it as publicising a neglected hero. But what the film does get factually correct is pretty much that Britain fought WWII against Hitler, that Alan Turing was a mathematician who used machines to break Enigma at Bletchley Park and who was prosecuted for his homosexuality after the war, dying, probably by suicide, shortly thereafter. Turing did have an infatuation with a boy called Christopher Morcom at school, who died, and that he was briefly engaged to Joan Clarke. Yet, at least in the UK, the first of the last two sentences is pretty much what can be taken as common knowledge about Alan Turing. It can certainly be taken as common knowledge amongst anyone likely to watch the film. For, while that was not the case at all in, say, the Seventies, that’s long since changed in the UK. (Not least thanks to Andrew Hodges, whose book I second the recommendation of.) By 2002, he was comfortably coming 21st in the BBC’s 100 Greatest Britons poll. At this point in time, he’s probably the single figure, obviously excluding Churchill, that most people in the UK now associate with WWII.
At least from the UK, it seems a sloppy way of publicising a supposedly neglected bit of history by only getting the stuff the audience already knows right, while fictionalising the bejesus out of everything else. (Yes, I know, money …)
My second point technically involves a spoiler, but the device in the film is transparent and non-essential.
As can be anticipated from the start, it is explicitly revealed towards the end that Turing’s narration is him telling the story to Rory Kinnear’s PC Plod in a police interview room in Manchester. The latter then having to go along with the official cover-up.
Except, surely this very precisely misses the central particular tragedy of Alan Turing’s prosecution. Pointing to his wartime achievements was what he couldn’t (and didn’t) try to do to the police or the court. That was the moral code that he couldn’t break.
He arrived in November 1942 and talked to the military in that month. We have his report about the lack of theoretical understanding. Note that the site leaves out 24 pages of technical specs on machinery. He went to theNational Cash Register Company in December, where he was skeptical of their bombe building methods, although my reading of that report is that the U.S. was building machines with higher part quality.
This is important mainly because Mr. won-the-war-all-by-himself-Turing was sent to the U.S. after the Germans changed to a four-rotor Enigma, meaning his previous bombes were superseded and the U.S. wanted to take over the decrypting.
None of this takes away from Turing’s genuine accomplishments, which were staggering. But he was part of a larger effort from start to finish.
It’s interesting to compare the movie to the U.S. series Manhattan, about the building of the atom bomb in Los Alamos. In the series, there’s a team of five people, led by an irascible, driven genius - and containing one woman - who is sure that their method can make the better bomb even though all the conventional authorities scoff at them. The period setting is perfect, but all the incidents that drive the plot are soap opera melodrama. And none of it is historically accurate, because, as with Turing, in reality they got tons of support and a much larger staff. Both are fascinating and infuriating in exactly the same ways. It’s like there’s a handbook for Hollywood writers requiring them to falsify history in specific ways because they think that the audience are idiots.
Another thing that bothered me: at the end of the movie there’s a series of titles that explain what happened later. One of them says that Turing’s invention of the Turing machine is now called the computer. A Turing machine is a theoretical construct that can’t be built because it requires an infinite amount of memory in the form of a tape. Even if it were possible to build a Turing machine, it would be terribly slow (because of the serial nature of its memory). The importance of a Turing machine is that it’s a very simple conceptual machine that can compute anything that’s computable. It’s not the equivalent of a modern computer - it’s a theoretical device that can do the same things as any computer.
Turing did not single-handedly invent the computer. He did make tremendous contributions to the field of computer science.
It got me curious if there was any indication that Turing had Asperger’s or something comparable, and I’ll be annoyed if it turns out he didn’t and it was used by the filmmaker as lazy shorthand for “math nerds are weird.”
This is the kind of movie that makes me want to watch a good documentary on the subject.
I recall a better take on the subject in Stephenson’s The Diamond Age, in which a character is educated about computers by being introduced to the Turing model, then gradually more efficient versions - always with the message that the machine’s basic capability never really changed.
Personally, I think this film needed a better framing device - someone playing chess against a modern computer (and losing), and explaining the history to his or her friend. The chat between Turing and the detective struck me as forced.