Turing is basically Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, I’ve read. From reading a bit more about Turing, he was probably a bit of a cocky flamer who got a little too comfortable about it, and eventually paid the price. The filmmakers figured the autistic Asperger’s angle would go over better with the audience, as it’s trendy right now.
You make it sound like he deserved to be prosecuted for homosexuality. How dare that uppity gay get comfortable!
That’s exactly how it happens, and was still happening when I was in the military.
It’s possible the filmmakers feared the audience would also conclude, “he kinda deserved it.”
I’ll broadly agree with Baron Greenback on this point, because I’m really not convinced that Turing ever went to the US to “fool” their military. Indeed, the first time I came across any allegation of the sort was in the very recent Guardian story that was explicitly tied to the film. Them dragging in Ian Fleming was a very big red implausibility flag in and of itself.
I’d suspect this is all just as much a new invention as Alan Turing as an “autistic idiot savant”.
Yes, the reports you cited are good evidence that Turing was rather unimpressed by US efforts in late 1942. I’m just not seeing what “he made off with”. It is true that, in the long run, a substantial proportion of the bombes were located and operated in the US and that that should be recognised. I might even, tongue in cheek, suggest that it was the usual story: British brains giving way to American resources … 
You’re right that I was citing the Guardian story and it’s very possible that it was inaccurate. I still say that the larger point is true; he was in America for two months and worked with top people both at Bell Labs and at NCR. Americans still needed another six months before they began decrypting messages with their bombes. Imagine the movie Turing in America.
The real Turing was a more complex, more interesting person. Bell Labs, incidentally, was still in Greenwich Village, perhaps the most gay-friendly spot in America at the time. Imagine what a different film that would have been.
Trekkers may appreciate, incidentally, that in an alternative universe, Data founded a colony of androids and AIs that named itself Turing: Iconia | Memory Beta, non-canon Star Trek Wiki | Fandom
I don’t know enough about Turing to know if it presents the facts well, but I enjoyed the documentary Codebreaker. It has an actor playing Turing in dramatized scenes as well as interviews with people who knew him and with various experts talking about the impact of his work. I didn’t get the impression from Codebreaker that Turing was on the autism spectrum, although it is a pretty short documentary so the filmmakers may have just chosen not to address that issue.
I saw it - emotionally, very effective; as history (as others have said), almost total nonsense.
Though to be fair, Turing’s actual (and very substantial) contributions to breaking Enigma and other codes may be somewhat hard to depict on film in a manner that is entertaining to the average viewer.
However, there were three bits of invention that were hard to forgive, because they slandered real people: first, Turing himself is slandered, as giving in to blackmail to conceal a Soviet spy (never happened); second, the guy in charge of the project is slandered, depicted as a stick-in-the-mud who nearly torpedoed the project out of pure conservatism (also never happened); and third, the contributions of the Poles - who invented the first “Bombe” or Enigma-breaking machine - are totally overlooked, with Turing depicted as inventing the machine from scratch all on his lonesome.
Just once in passing Turing says something about the Poles, but you have to listen very carefully or you’ll miss it.
He may have mentioned the Poles (I indeed missed it 
), but he’s depicted as inventing the Bombe from scratch. Unless I am much mistaken, the movie does not show him having already a working Bombe courtesy of the Poles, which has already been used to decypher earlier Enigma encrypts.
Though admittedly that would not have the same dramatic impact as what they did show.
The reality appears to be that there was no one single “Eureka” moment - rather, there was a nail-biting see-saw between the Allied decoders and successive Nazi improvements to the Enigma (and different Nazi services) - the Poles broke an early version, the Nazis improved their machine, and the Poles were unable to muster the resources necessary to break the improved version (then their country was overrun). That’s when Turing & Co. stepped in.
The amazing thing is that the Nazis never cottoned on to the race they were in - they had no idea of the Allied successes, they just kept improving the Enigma anyway.
Yes. I think it’s when Turing and the others of the initial British team are first shown the German machine.
One of the reasons the breaking of Enigma was kept secret for so long, is that after the war, the Allies sold working machines to various countries, who of course were unaware that they were no longer secure. Sneaky…
It was also annoying that the movie introduced a phony midnight deadline for cracking the day’s code.
One thing I did appreciate, though, was that they included quite a few small events that really did help crack the Enigma. I believe it’s Joan who mentions that the Enigma never encodes a letter to itself, there’s a quick shot of someone using a Zygalski sheet, and of course the Nazi operator who used the same 5 letters every day, among other things. I geeked out.
Which leads to one of the scenes in the film that doesn’t even make sense in terms of the script’s own internal logic:
At war’s end, Stewart Menzies assembles the cryptographers of Bletchley Park - all six of them - to tell them that they will have to destroy all the machines and paperwork in order to preserve the secret. Whereupon Turing instantly figures out that this is why the secret must be preserved.
But if this is the devilish plan, surely that’s the stuff you want to keep? To, um, keep on breaking other countries’ codes?
It’s the latter that largely happened. Churchill did want everything destroyed, but saner heads mainly prevailed. So, at Jack Good’s insistence, several Colossus machines went to GCHQ and saw service well into the 1950s (and were then unceremoniously junked). The technical papers were almost all preserved and seem to have remained relevant for quite some time. Even the operational stuff like the card files reconstructing the German order of battle and the like were kept.
What were destroyed at war’s end were famously the blueprints for the machines and most of the machines themselves. But that may have been because it was realised how quickly there were likely to become superfluous as kit. Keep some of the machines as a stopgap, yes, but realise that their next generation replacements are going to be a whole new kettle of fish.[sup]*[/sup]
[sub]* But still same old Fish.[/sub]
Don’t understand why people complain that the movie leaves things out. Has Hollywood ever made a movie that is 100% true based on a real person or story?
I don’t think any film could ever fully dramatize WWII code-breaking, mostly because of how compartmentalized it was. Most films require a single protagonist that the audience can identify with, through whom the story can be told - but there probably was no single person in the entire effort who could serve that purpose, who knew everything that was happening in the code-breaking effort.
For instance, I’m a huge fan of Juan Pujol, aka Garbo. I’ve read half a dozen or so books on him, and apparently his voluminous bogus reports were sent to the Nazis from England using a paper-based code, which were received in Madrid, decoded and re-encoded with an Enigma. As far as I can tell, the original reports were supplied to Bletchley, and when the encrypted transmissions to Berlin were intercepted, they would have a huge trove of both the original text and the encrypted version. But I don’t know if the cryptographers were aware of this. How far could they be trusted?
There are Hollywood movies that are based on true stories that come closer to reality than The Imitation Game. (I’m going to use the term “Hollywood movies” loosely for any big-budget film that gets wide release in the U.S., just as Bijou Drains did, since this is actually a British movie.) We’re talking about the film’s accuracy because that’s what we do here on the SDMB. We’re interested in facts. A discussion of the accuracy of a film is just as important as a discussion of its artistic merits. As to the truth of this film, I think that, for instance, the film The Theory of Everything does a better job of reflecting the facts in its case than this film does.
More than any individual error, I think it’s worthwhile to discuss the more general ways that Hollywood movies distort every true story. They consistently portray the hero/heroine as playing a larger role in whatever struggle they were involved in than happened in truth. They fail to show how that struggle was won by the work of a large diverse group rather than a few heroic individuals. They make what happened seem much more dramatic than in reality by showing the action as occurring by last-minute action scenes that barely came off rather than long-planned-out actions that had no hitches in them. The hero/heroine will be the best-looking person in the film and much better-looking than in reality.
There is also a tendency to portray the attitudes of society in films about the more or less recent past (within the past century or so) as fitting whatever stereotypes most people now (or at least most Hollywood people now) have about those times. In particular, The Imitation Game corresponds to present stereotypes about how people in the 1940’s and 1950’s treated homosexuality. Formerly, Hollywood movies would never mention homosexuality or treat it as being something so rare that it could be passed off as a weird deviation not worthy of thinking about. Now when a Hollywood film shows a character in the 1940’s or 1950’s as homosexual, they show them as being persecuted by most people, fired or beaten or blackmailed or arrested or whatever else was appropriate.
In fact, the attitudes of Americans and Brits to homosexuality during the time of The Imitation Game were less hostile than in the movie, not more hostile. Yeah, everyone knew that it was illegal, and yet not many people were arrested for it. Yeah, there were firings and beatings and blackmail, but there wasn’t as much of that as you might think. Look, I remember my conservative rural high school in the late 1960’s and my liberal college in the early 1970’s. One of the teachers at my high school was generally known to be homosexual, and yet he wasn’t fired. This was largely because football was the religion at my high school. He wasn’t a coach, but he was the athletic supervisor there, and the head football coach didn’t want to lose him. There were some people in the school district who wanted to fire him, but they were outvoted. And, no, this wasn’t because this was the swinging '60’s. As I said, this was a conservative rural area, and there was as much “I hate hippies” attitude as in most places. In my liberal college in 1971, there was a protest by some gay men (following a protest earlier by some feminists) about attitudes toward homosexuals and women. Nobody - and I mean nobody - would have remotely thought about calling the police to arrest them. There were people who disagree with their demands, but nobody thought that homosexuality should be illegal. The fact is that Turing’s colleagues mostly knew that he was gay and did nothing about it. Joan Clarke knew that he was gay and didn’t break off the engagement. Neither Cairncross nor anyone else at Bletchley tried to blackmail Turing, and Cairncross couldn’t have because he didn’t actually know Turing.
What was dangerous about being homosexual during the war and later, when the Cold War was at its height, is that the government assumed that anyone who was gay was subject to blackmail by the other side. That made them security risks. The only way they could get out of this was by publicly proclaiming they were homosexual, and that would immediately get them arrested. But hiding the fact would lead officialdom to assume they were hiding other things and that made them security risks. And those who knew the secret were also therefore hiding things and that made them vulnerable to suspicion.
Being homosexual was a no-win proposition. It didn’t matter that it could be accepted elsewhere; inside the war machine your very existence was an affront to the war effort.
It skips through 24 years in under two hours - it’s not like much happened, right?
Its a Hollywood entertainment piggybacking on the life of someone who really doesn’t need to be exploited by a bunch of money grabbing, ham-fisted faux liberals.
You want to eat popcorn and feel ‘informed’ go see this.
It would be much better to tell a story like that in 10 hours or so , like a HBO miniseries. But even then I’m sure they would leave stuff out and change things to make for better TV.