The Imitation Game (probable spoilers)

[John_Bredin]

@Just_Asking_Questions

I find this movie hugely ironic .

During the release of U-571, the British complained about being “Hollywoodized” out of their contribution to decoding, in that it was they rather then the Americans that recovered an Enigma machine.

So in this British movie, the filmmakers completely ignore Poland’s contributions to the effort, primarily the fact that they built the first “bombe” rather than the Brits, and that Turing’s (sizeable, admittedly) contributions were based on the Polish machine.

It’s a throwaway line, but when Turing is introducing his coworkers to his machine, he mentions that it’s based on a Polish machine but improved by himself. And earlier in the movie when the new hires were shown the Enigma machine, their boss (the Navy officer) mentioned that they got it from the Poles.

[Lantern]

I agree with most of the criticisms here: too much cheap melodrama, phony crises and cliche characters. It’s rather remarkable it won an Oscar for screenplay since that was the weakest part of the film.

On balance I still enjoyed the film mildly because the underlying story is fascinating and the film did have decent production values and acting. It could have been so much better though.

[ftg]

@Lobot

Sure, most people still don’t really fully understand why he was important (“He invented computers!” is wildly inaccurate and does a disservice to von Neumann, for example) nor would they recognise the man from his portrayal, but at least it’s a start.

Von Neumann? Good grief. He has a terrible reputation in the more knowledgeable CS corners for stealing Turing’s (and Mauchly and Eckert’s) ideas and presenting them as his own. And that’s really the only thing he’s known for in CS. Note that ENIAC and such weren’t stored program computers and therefore not computers as we consider them today. Turing came up with that. Read more here.

Turing really did push the development of computers far more than any other person. He wrote seminal papers in several branches on CS and came up with some of the earliest major innovations in computer hardware as well. He wasn’t just a Theorist. No one comes anywhere close to impact on the field.

BigT: Perchance you are referring to Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi? I saw it years ago. The “technical” stuff was practically non-existent with “personal” stuff dominating the show. Not very interesting, geek-wise. OTOH it did have Jacobi.

[BigT]

@ftg

BigT: Perchance you are referring to Breaking the Code with Derek Jacobi? I saw it years ago. The “technical” stuff was practically non-existent with “personal” stuff dominating the show. Not very interesting, geek-wise. OTOH it did have Jacobi.

Yes, :smack:. I know it was much less technical, but I wondered if they got the history more correct, since a lot of what people are complaining about is the history.

The only thing I know is that I think they overplayed the evidence of suicide, making his mom seem like she couldn’t accept it rather than it being questionable.

And, yes, Jacobi’s portrayal of Turing absolutely made that film. Before, I’d thought that Hollywood had had fully realized gay characters, but this was on another level. That’s part of my disappointment in hearing of Cumberbatch’s affected portrayal.

[bonzer]

The whole issue of Breaking The Code has bothered me in respect of The Imitation Game. Because, hang on, there’s already the serious British dramatisation of the story, done nearly - god forbid - thirty years ago, involving a great British actor playing Turing, that, from memory, pretty much got the details broadly right.
I saw Jacobi live doing Turing in the 1994 tour of the play. Given the fame at the time of Whitemore’s rendering of the Halting Theorem as the grand theatrical joke, I must admit I was probably the only member of the matinee audience on a weekday in Newcastle who saw any humour in it at all. That in general was, however, orders of magnitude of cleverness above anything The Imitation Game even attempts. That reservation aside, Jacobi was fabulous.
Equally from memory of the original broadcast, the BBC version suffers from Jacobi just being too old to do the part at that point.

Bottom line: for all its limitations, Breaking The Code shows up the failings of the film.

[Wallaby]

Saw the movie - I knew most of the story, but still enjoyed at as a fun night out - suspend disbelief and all that.

It’s the classic British take on many subjects - a small group of slightly weird characters gather haphazardly under the direction of a mildly eccentric genius and win the war from a small hut - ‘Boffins in Sheds’. All despite doubt, hostility and interference from a blinkered, blustering, antiquated military establishment. The Dam Busters is another - Barnes Wallis is played by Michael Redgrave in full ‘Doddery Old Grandfather Mode’ when he was actually one of the country’s leading aircraft designers and had been working for the Ministry for Defence for years.

The Brits had experience with code-breaking from WW1 when they obtained German Naval codebooks, and then continued to break the codes. They knew about how to selectively use the information without compromising the source. (They hadn’t done it very well in WW1, but had studied the problem rigorously in the inter-war years. They got it right with the Zimmerman telegram, though). The idea of letting a group of people with no military training, no tactical knowledge of war aims, and no understanding of security decide what information could and couldn’t be used was ludicrous.

It’s interesting - if this movie was a pure fiction, people would enjoy it - ‘Although obviously completely fanciful’. But because it uses real names and events, there are those who will think it is true, and Turing DID shorten the war by 2 years on his own (forget the other 10,000 people working at Bletchley). Then throw in some modern PC regarding some common community attitudes of the time (sexism and homophobia) and it becomes ‘worthy’.

[amanset]

@Just_Asking_Questions

I find this movie hugely ironic .

During the release of U-571, the British complained about being “Hollywoodized” out of their contribution to decoding, in that it was they rather then the Americans that recovered an Enigma machine.

So in this British movie, the filmmakers completely ignore Poland’s contributions to the effort, primarily the fact that they built the first “bombe” rather than the Brits, and that Turing’s (sizeable, admittedly) contributions were based on the Polish machine.

The inaccuracies of the film were quite widely reported in the UK, although a lot of that is about the portrayal of Turing. I have read a lot about the Polish contribution being diminished in the film.

I enjoyed the film but it also annoyed me because of this. And I’m British.

[BigT]

@bonzer

The whole issue of Breaking The Code has bothered me in respect of The Imitation Game. Because, hang on, there’s already the serious British dramatisation of the story, done nearly - god forbid - thirty years ago, involving a great British actor playing Turing, that, from memory, pretty much got the details broadly right.

Wait, it’s that old? I guess that’s why I was able to watch it on YouTube without the BBC freaking out. But I had it placed in the 90s at most. Gay people were handled that well in the 1980s?!

[MarcusF]

@BigT

Wait, it’s that old? I guess that’s why I was able to watch it on YouTube without the BBC freaking out. But I had it placed in the 90s at most. Gay people were handled that well in the 1980s?!

The BBC production of Breaking the Code is from 1996. It was the stage version that dates from the 80s. Having said that, I don’t think there would be a problem with having a sympathetic gay character on TV in the 80s. High-brow dramas had had openly regular gay characters from the 70s (I’m thinking of the* Naked Civil Servant*) and Eastenders, the BBC’s flagship mid-evening soap, had a gay character in 1986 and the first gay kiss in 1987. This was one of the earliest non-comic gay characters on prime-time UK TV but attitudes were definitely already on the move.

[MarcusF]

@bonzer

FWIW, the couple of years estimate famously derives from Harry Hinsley, the official historian of British intelligence in WWII. I’m fairly sure he very explicitly states a specific estimate somewhere, but his introduction as editor to the very good collection Codebreakers (OUP, 1993) is somewhat vague on the precise issue, while indeed acknowledging that the Manhattan Project might well have made the whole issue moot anyway.

I missed this when this thread was first opened. Harry Hinsley’s argument about the impact of ULTRA is on line in a transcript of a talk he gave in Cambridge in 1993. Personally I think he overstates the case (he had something of a vested interest as he was a Bletchley Park veteran as well as a historian) and other factors were already overwhelming the U-boats in late 1942 but the relevant bit goes:

Sir Harry Hinsley:

Now the question remains how much did it shorten the war, leaving aside the contribution made to the campaigns in the Far East on which the necessary work hasn’t been done yet. My own conclusion is that it shortened the war by not less that two years and probably by four years - that is the war in the Atlantic, the Mediterranean and Europe.

The detailed answer for those theatres begins in the Mediterranean. There, in the autumn of 1941 against Rommel it turned almost certain defeat into a stalemate. If not then, then certainly in the summer of 1941 after Rommel had returned to the Egyptian frontier, it made a decisive contribution to keeping him out of Egypt between his victory at the Battle of Gazala in 1942 and the British getting ready for their own victory at El Alamein.

It did this chiefly by killing off his seaborne supplies. Both the Italian machine cipher and the airforce Enigma and a bit of naval Enigma contributed decisively to starving Rommel of fuel and replacement hardware and ammunition.

Without that, the commander of our own forces at the time, General Auchinleck, concluded that Rommel would have got through to Egypt.

As you know at that time the Allies themselves were landing in North West Africa. If they had lost Egypt they might have abandoned the operation against North West Africa, especially as they would also have lost Malta if Egypt went, and decided to alter their strategy (we have to allow for this possibility) and go back and concentrate on the North Sea and the direct Second Front.

Now if they had stayed in the Mediterranean it would have taken them a least a year longer than it actually took them from Tunis and from the Western Desert to complete the conquest of North Africa and open the Mediterranean. That was successfully achieved in May '43.

It wouldn’t have been achieved in less than a year beyond that, if we had gone on in spite of the loss of Egypt trying to do it. It wouldn’t have been achieved in time to do the Normandy landings in 1944.

If they had abandoned the idea of re-conquering North Africa, the most probable course would have been in fact what the Americans had always wanted to do, to do the cross Channel invasion more quickly than in fact occurred. It in fact occurred in June '44. They would have turned back and done that straight away, that was their obvious alternative.

What would have been the prospect for that undertaking if Ultra hadn’t become available against the U-Boats in June 1941 and radically reduced their successes against the convoys.

We know that in that second half of 1941 their shipping successes were cut back to 120,000 tons a month average. That has to be compared not with the monthly average of 280,000 tons a months in the four months before June '41 but with the sinkings they would have achieved with their greater number of U-Boats.

It has been calculated that the Ultra saved about one and half million tons in September, October, November and December '41.

And even if Britain’s essential imports had not without that reduction been reduced to a dangerously low level, the intermission that provided was invaluable in enabling the British to build up reserves in merchant shipping and develop anti-submarine defences.

So that when the U-Boats returned to the Atlantic after their first defeat (they did that in the autumn of 1942), they had been delayed in making a decisive thrust for more than a year. Now when they returned they had been supplied with an advanced Enigma, one that instead of using three wheels concurrently used four wheels, which as you can see noticeably increased the mathematical difficulties of solving the key.

In fact Bletchley couldn’t solve it from February to December 1942. Mercifully for us (though not for the Americans) most of the U-Boats were on the Atlantic American coast at that time, but as they came back to the North Atlantic convoys they were still using this cipher and they brought about another crisis in the Atlantic.

It again was the Ultra which brought them under control. The figures of sinkings of Allied shipping reached the highest in the war in March '43. They had been brought down by May '43 to lower proportions than ever before in the war as a result of this return of Ultra to the scene.

And so you can see that the problem of undertaking the Normandy landings if those two defeats and controls of the U-Boats hadn’t occurred would have been very pronounced.

Then there was the contribution of Enigma to the Normandy Landings themselves (I can’t go into detail and will answer questions if you need). I think it is no exaggeration to say that even if the U-Boats had prevented it from being attempted only until '45, we would have found it an infinitely more difficult operation to do than in 1944. The Germans would have completed the Atlantic defences, they would be bombarding Britain with ‘V’ weapons on a massive scale, all of which was in the event cut off by the '44 Landings. And they would have had a much bigger Panzer Army to deal with the problems.

My own calculation is we wouldn’t in fact have been able to do the Normandy Landings, even if we had left the Mediterranean aside, until at the earliest 1946, probably a bit later. It would have then taken much longer to break through in France and Germany than it did in fact take, which was a year from '44. And altogether therefore the war would have been something like two years longer, perhaps three years longer, possibly four years longer than it was.

[Deeg]

That’s an interesting analysis. He indicates that Ultra information was used in Stalingrad and Kursk, which I didn’t know. The problem I always had with the “2-4 years” guess was that the Russians would have conquered Germany in less time than that. Thanks for the link MarcusF.