Thoughts on 'The Imitation Game'

We went to see 'The Imitation Game' Friday afternoon.  It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as Alan Turing, the British mathematician whose team cracked the Nazi's Enigma encryptian code during World War II.  The movie was directed by Morten Tyldem from a script written by Graham Moore that is based on the book, 'Alan Turing: The Enigma' by Andrew Hodges.

Poster for 'The Imitation Game'

The movie jumps between three time periods:  Turing's unhappy teen years at boarding school;  Turing's wartime efforts to crack Enigma at Bletchley Park; and Turing's post-war arrest, interrogation and conviction for 'gross indecency' (homosexuality) in the early 1950's.  The '50's interrogation scene forms a rather awkward and confusing framing device for the Bletchley Park scenes, while flashbacks to boarding school and Turing's schoolboy infatuation with another boy -- complete with encrypted love notes -- provide context for the brilliant, but socially awkward, adult mathematician.

Cumberbatch brilliantly conveys Turing's arrogance and inability to relate to the team of linguists, cryptographers and mathematicians assembled by the British at Bletchley Park to break the Nazi code.  The team consists of a number of familiar faces: Keira Knightley as Joan Clark, the only woman on the team; Charles Dance (of 'Game of Thrones' and 'Jewels in the Crown') as Alastair Denniston, the autocratic naval commander in charge; Matthew Goode (of 'The Good Wife') as Hugh Alexander; Allen Leech (of 'Downton Abbey') as John Cairncross; and Matthew Beard as Peter Hilton.  Mark Strong plays the team's MI6 liaison to Winston Churchill, Stewart Menzies.  Rory Kinnear plays Detective Nock, Turing's police interrogator in 1950's scenes. 

At the end of the war the team was instructed by Menzies to burn all of the evidence of their work, never meet and never discuss their contribution to the Allied victory over the Nazis.  The activities of the team that cracked Enigma were not officially disclosed until 50 years after World War II, long after Turing had committed suicide in 1954.  Turing was formally pardoned by Queen Elizabeth II only in 2013.  Turing built a very primitive, nearly room-sized computer (named 'Christopher' after his schoolboy crush) which helped crack the code.  Following the war he theorized about the possibility of creating artificial intelligence -- what he called 'the imitation game'.  Turing's actual and theoretical work -- before, during and after World War II -- became the foundation of modern computer science.

There is much interesting history and science presented in 'The Imitation Game', but it is fractured and fragmented in a way that makes it difficult to take in.  Except for Cumberbatch's superb performance as Turing, it is not a movie that I would recommend to anyone who doesn't already have some understanding of Alan Turing and Enigma.